


The Return Heptalogy (TRH) Part Seven: Freedom to Live

by darkrabbit



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors, Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: F/M, M/M, Post Mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-20
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2017-12-30 00:26:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 27
Words: 19,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1011842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkrabbit/pseuds/darkrabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not the Sandman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Pilgrim at the Gates

Gutarriezknindracastorblyledgespillioth touches his hands to the sheets of fine whitish metal bolting closed the storage room door. The bolts are large on the sides, large enough to tear him in two should he attempt it.

 

Hainish’s doing- he can feel the dissipating residue of a Space-Time Trap in the vicinity, all squiggles and interrupted timelines. Other Time Lords have been trapped in here, before this great crude bolted portal was installed.

 

Of course he’s going to. Naturally.

 

He digs his white, clean nails into the edge of space running through the middle of the entry, stuffing his fingers into the spiking lock mechanism within the gap.

 

The door will chew his nails for him, he thinks, as he angles his elbows out to his sides and pulls, his Time Lord senses straining through the metal’s individual atoms, touching them. In the space of many microns, countless covalencies flatten and stretch between his fingertips.

 

With his senses, he feels every tiny bond between the molecules of the door. If he can just... wedge himself, will them apart, he can... almost...

 

Pain erupts along the bottom of the front of his neck, surfacing and diving under his slender collarbone.

 

He sinks against the door with his hair tangling a web through his hands, remembering the doppelganger of Hainish created by the Namaste Nerada, back when the pod fell. And at the gala, when the mind-controlled Hand scratched the Doctor in its bird-form... had it been them then, too? And why Hainish? The Doctor’s instructions... the Doctor. Who?

 

The image of the Doctor decaying into a river of the dust of man superimposes itself, slamming into him, trumpeting a fresh strength through his nerves. He pulls again, easily ripping some of his long emerald locks away from his scalp and drawing it across his vision in little wet strings of hyper-gravitised blood and shredded Time Lord.

 

Brrrrr-AK.

 

He casts the bits of door aside, and the two wrenched sheets fall back in a heavy sigh of creaking metal.

 

Down his arms comes a roving wave of pain like burning pitch, radiating from a weakened structure in his upper chest. The space above his hearts... something is crunching inside the small place... broken and sliding. A bone? Ah yes- his clavicle.

 

Soon his muscles will give way, due to the lack of support in the center of his chest.

 

He rests back on the floor for only a moment, then pitches himself into the austere little room to grab the folded clothes sitting neatly in a pile.

 

Next to a blue time travel capsule.

 

A glass jar of pale dirt sets beside her.

 

Oh. Of course. The Rings. Or perhaps... the Ring. Could it really be so simple?

 

All right then, he thinks to himself, calculating how long it will take him to get the simple dust cloak and cap on and leave.

 

 The door is just outside, only a few steps away.

 

The Eye is due to open in approximately five minutes time. He must cross under it before it opens, for if it sights him it will alert the guards. And through them, the Pythia.


	2. The Green Stile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Duck, Duck, Caboose.

Rassilon taps a foot against the steaming grate underneath him, his nearly vacant eyes straying again to the rumpled bundle in his arms.

 

Sleeeeee.

 

Finally the doors slide apart, allowing him entry into the Jade Pagoda.

 

His eyes are no longer devoid; instead, they glance about the area, taking in the true shape of the little artifice’s control room now that the need for subterfuge has ceased temporarily.

 

The central control, a blackish column most incongruous and grim, sits darkened. There are thick silvery wires flowing across the shadowed floor like roots... but these too are sleeping; there is no heat, sound or light spilling through their polished metal.

 

The crèches, too, are...

 

 Wait.

 

Three are empty- one bears the indent of a young child. The other two are imbued with the taller dents of two much bigger people, a man with large hips and a woman with the same.

 

He shifts his snuffling carry-on luggage to the other arm, settles her in, then carefully picks his way over to the other two crèches.

 

One is partially open and draining a white liquid. The liquid has been dripping and steaming itself onto the incandescent blue panels beneath.  River’s. So she was using a double-routed as well.

 

Shwooooosh-tuwheek! Cuhhh.

 

The other occupied creche shifts open, and Lord Borusa steps out, her entire young body catching at the back-sliding door like a reanimated corpse.

 

He should leave her alone.

 

But he can’t, regardless of what she’s discovered.

 

Her fingers are white on her joints as she breathes from the knees, curtaining the crisp black of the floor with golden hair.

 

He has to ask.

 

But her fingers snap up, and smear his query like a smudge of unlucky insect.

 

“...Jack is still at the Indso Tys, probably lying where the Doctor left him when he pulled us into the Land of Fiction. You should go and fetch him. The Valeyard got a nasty surprise when he leaped into the Flesh the Doctor prepared for him. He should be around somewhere near the Pyramid Corridor’s Mnrva exit. Fetch him too. I’m going back in. To test a theory.”

 

Rassilon’s eyebrows slide a fraction upward, despite himself. He feels his chin degrade in rotation, somehow, betraying his surprise.

 

“You should be used to his version of schooling by now,” Borusa quips hoarsely from her crèche, her diminutive digits tight and serious on the large inner handle as she shifts to close it again, “... The Doctor always takes us for quite an education- and what do we get in return? That boy, forcing us to sail strange seas in a rickety boat! I don’t even know what a boat IS!”

 

Sparkle-eyed with delight, she sticks her blonde head out and stares at him, then slaps his hand with a blue post-it before shutting the door completely.

 

Rassilon sticks the now post-it adorned free hand in his mouth and sighs as he walks away, thinking he may never bite down on his laughter so hard as on this day, at this resolute moment.

 

Against his chest, Flamina snuggles into his cool warmth, nuzzling closer in her sleep.

 

His smile splits him down at her with fingers and teeth set on preventing his lips from parting, trapping his tongue and a building desire to snort in the back of his nasal passage; it simply wouldn’t do to wake her now.

 


	3. Spiracle Worker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jonah and the Snail.

Rassilon walks in the ice covering Mnrva, striding toward the place of rendezvous. He thinks of Flamina, sleeping in the Doctor’s room in a queer blue pram dangling gold stars, lovingly tended by the hologram hands of a Victorian party girl in scruffy, scandalous blue.   

 

He comes around a corner, shifting his weight from foot to foot in the manner of confident gait, his body tensing for the sights he might glimpse should he procure a premature glance at the solemn winter now dolloping most of the planet.

 

He places his feet again in the center of the street by a brick, following the compass needle lead of a twisting glass and brick thing far in the distance... the Indso Tys.

 

The window of a shop comes into view, drifting heavily between the dignified signage of a prominent carbonated soft drink facility- a green roundish building set into a square gold base, and the towering pyramidal modern glasswork of a once bustling escort service. That one’s sign is only partially-covered; it reads:

 

E . . . . . . T

. . . . I S T.

 

In the pass-through between them, a shadow plays along the lines of parking space, running thick, distorted fingers through the network of rows.

 

Rassilon picks up his pace, diverting his attention to this new presence as he begins to skirt the side street leading to the backs of the shops, crunching the ice underfoot, spraying frosty bits of snow in limp little spritzes.

 

“You know, I’ve a message for you, Valeyard,” he says to the shadow.

 

An abrupt end to the dancing figures, then.

 

 No more prancing long dark wands of shade against the opposite walls, as the sound of soft, dejected walking taps toward him.

 

Before a minute passes, the man himself turns in an appearance, seeming to hover as he walks into the snow-light.

 

“Meh. I was making ice people. With my sonic. Is this what you’re reduced to, Dallyrasse? His royal nerdiness’s missive boy?” the Valeyard quips, before reaching down to furiously scrub his toes, “... I can’t.”

 

–feel my toes-

 

“I take it the nails are blue?” Rassilon murmurs, cocking his black haired head and blowing no his fingers demurely.  “Your cheeks are a bit hollow, and your eyes seem darker. But I know better than to ask why. Of course you have a plan, so I won’t bother asking –that-.  I have a message for you, by the way.”

 

“I can’t...  I can’t seem to decide between grey or black,” the Valeyard breathes, pinching his lips in a vague pout as he holds up a derby of the aforementioned color in each hand.

 

Rassilon sighs, and brushes a hand through his hair. He smiles.

 

“Do you remember that time we were stranded in the Silver Devastation, during the First Campaign?” he chirps, patting the Valeyard on the leg. “Definitely the grey. It brings out your eyes.”

 

“Hrm, I see your point. And who could forget Them? Those damned priestesses pulled a rusted blaster on us, trying to force us to sleep with each other so  they could watch- the dirty old bats... gods but they had been holed up in that rotted hovel too long! Oh my word. So. Funny. Do you remember what they called you when you finally relented and stripped for them?  I do.” The Valeyard grins, rolling his eyes up into his head as his mind recalls the word. “Conqueror Worm. Hilarious.”

 

A hot blush spills over Rassilon’s features, coloring his face in cherry-chalk.

 

“Do not tell the Master, or I will steal every one of your hats and cast them into the Everlasting Fires of the Icy Void from whence your little problem comes,” Rassilon snarls, his face a mess of catshark teeth.

 

“Just hand me the bloody note, you wretched fool! I can’t take the suspense.”

 

The blue post-it exchanges hands.

 

The Valeyard fingers the dyed paper, soaking in the beloved color for a moment before reading the inscription aloud.

 

“He who makes the nostrils of whales and insects to open.”

 

“Oh for the love of Pete Tyler, how annoying...” he mutters, waving to Rassilon as he putters back toward the shop and his set out selection of suits, waving a foppish backhand, “...the grey it is. I’m thinking a nice stick as well... something with silver, so I can look dapper falling on my arse as I’m being eaten alive. Personally, I’d rather be sleeping with River right now, excepting that a good suit is ten times better than a good woman, and I’d rather be dressing for my last hurrah then spend it in bed with that midas-haired demon wench. Savvy?” He ascends the small stair leading to the shop, leaving the single glass door with its bruised gold etchings to creak closed by itself. His fingers open over the long antique brass handle, and...

 


	4. Like a Seahorse in Reverse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Path of the Nautilus.

Flashback.

 

The Doctor blinks.

 

His Flesh body is bared... in all its lines and space... to the glass of the dressing room mirror. Outside, he can hear the sounds of swimming in the pool- River, also wearing a Flesh, splashing softly as she waits for him.

 

Splursh.

 

Plish-plop.

 

He finds his naked feet tingling with the need to join her now.

 

So he lets them, tromping back out of the little powder cubby into the main swimming pool room.

 

A towel covers him below the waist, just a fluffy white thing of little import.

 

He discards it to the floor, shoving its softness aside with his foot.

 

He feels River staring, like a crawling of lilies up over the tips of his spinal column.

 

Without the towel, the girth added to his middle by Flamina’s weight is a visible effigy in skin and sinew, a hard half-ball of undercooked baby-flavoured gelatin sticking out ever so slightly from under his navel.

 

He walks; the cement of the pool surround floor is rough on his softened feet.

 

The first of his toes dip under the cold blue surface of the pool.

 

He goes to her, and her blue green grey eyes watch him descend the hard stairs into the water, transfixed by the sway of his sturdy hips, the pale peridot of his own eyes braying a donkey’s hair-curling cry of indignation. How dare she look like that heavenly!

 

The form of him fords the liquid around and behind himself, nearing her.

 

River.

 

She is standing there, her hair flowing o’er, cascading down the skin of her back. It covers her shoulders like bits of ripe pollen, waving in wheat-streams.

 

“Fort Knox called, all the way from America,” he murmurs, flattening a hand across his belly as he laughs in her face, then pulls her hand around his waist, ‘... they want their gold back.”

 

She giggles at him, snuffling as his hair sweeps her face like a floppy brown mouse. He smells like hot sawdust, like cinnamon. Like a good clean rain. There are, however, spikes of rose water, small touches of elephant dung... spices. And.

 

Their arms reach, fingers grasping hair and shoulders and muscle and bone as they wrap together.

 

White melts into white.

 

The water churns in a swirl of thin fluid, forming mountains, becoming alive with their scratch-mannequin thrashing, their throes.

 

They meld like two singularities, black into white, white into black, the cliché of yin and yang as their bodies twist together, weaving themselves like a living Chinese finger puzzle.

 

Lips of wild water cast themselves onto the edges of the pool floor in hot waves that touch the walls in places.

 

Are they smoking, he wonders, as his womb tears open and connects with hers, forming a second short, tight tube of molded Flesh. He feels a hard tug, a burning rent, then the vicious shredding certainty of conduit as his womb shoves its contents into River’s grasping receptacle. Something connects across the Pond, as River shudders briefly. It is done.

 

The conjoinment soon withdraws like a splitting cell and dissipates. Then they both close off their wounds, recalling their material with a snapping slap of flapping body against choppy water.

 

“Don’t fall asleep in the pool, honey,” she murmurs, smacking him gently and grabbing his arm when he starts to totter backward, away from her, “... you’ll drown.”

 

Then she pulls him toward her bosom, laying his head against her naked breasts.

 

“We should probably get out now...” he murmurs from the relative safety of his twin cushions... they afford him such a lovely bird’s eye view of her pretty new belly.

 

She just smiles, and wraps her arms around his shoulders, helping him stand upright.

 

“Eventually, eventually...” she says as she closes her eyes and lowers her chin into his brown hair, “... please, my love... let’s stay like this... for just a little longer.”


	5. Apple Wine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Son of Appletweed.

Yeah, it’s an apple all right, Jack reasons as he shines the hard fruit on the shirt he’s now wearing.

 

It’s blue.

 

The shirt, not the apple.

 

When did he start wearing a shirt?

 

There are trousers, his usual grey trousers, covering him now.

 

Aw. Yep. The Doctor even remembered his tighty whiteys.

 

“I didn’t do that,” comes the Time Lord’s disembodied response.

 

Jack looks up. There’s now a painting hanging over the window, obscuring it.

 

The Doctor is in the portrait, reclining with his face away from Jack. There is a cherub holding a mirror.

 

“You know the drill by now, Jack,” the Doctor breathes, laughing in the shadow of a billowing curtain within the framed and painted picture, “...the Venus of Rokeby was right. ‘...please explore these lands further before you return to me.’ That seems to be the running joke, anyways.”

 

“Well I thought you were directing this movie. But if you aren’t, then... so we’re all in the toilet, huh? My kind of odds. How are you at Double Fanucci, Doc? I used to skirt the tournaments, back in my Time Agency days.”

 

“ I wouldn’t know, since I seem to have lent you my copy of Zork Nemesis. Now I’ll thank you to take a bite of that apple! I’m rather busy at the...”

 

Jack’s fingers tighten around the apple as he watches the painting shimmer and shift, becoming a white line of laundry hanging over the window, still obscuring the view of the room inside.

 

 White linens frequent the long rows of hung, prickly twine.

 

But there it is.

 

 A single white and blue plaid flannel, pinned by two clothes pegs.

 

It is flapping in the wind.

 

 Back.

 

Forth.

 

 Back.

 

Forth.

 

Blap-blap.

 

Blap blap blap.

 

Jack reaches and grabs it.

 

The rag is applied.

 

 He scuffs at the edges, then works the flannel in loose, easy circles around the body of the fruit, shining it up till it gleams like a baby grand in a New York loft, first the golden side, then the silver.

 

In the shiny, reflective surface, there seems to be a... man, hanging from a bridge of old ropes and boards.

 

There is green leafy jungle below, a limp sea of lime gelatin and cannabis.

 

That almost ginger hair... those curls in the mess...

 

It’s the Eighth Doctor.

 

Ah.

 

“Hey Doc, you think I could...” Jack begins, turning to look for the painting again.

 

Then he remembers.

 

It’s gone.

 

“Time to air my dirty laundry, is it, Doctor? Well, all right then. Let’s get to it.”

 

Jack grins, and stares at the apple in his hands as he slowly holds it up closer and closer to his face.

 

It stares into him. 


	6. The Emperor's New Bose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prawn Stars.

The Valeyard’s slumbering arm is draped with a half dozen shirts, all of which go with the lovely grey suit he’s chosen.

 

His fingers are aching like little carrots afflicted by root rot.

 

“What about this one?” he asks, sticking his free hand into the open air, holding out a slick silver tie with thin black striping for Rassilon’s peruse.

 

“Hrm, not enough contrast for the black to work. Try the gold again. And Valeyard...” Rassilon says demurely from his perch atop an iced bench, “...if you need to take a break... there’s no shame in it. It’s hard to choose a good armor to die in. You know I always had trouble.”

 

The Valeyard pops his head around the sliding fitting room door, opening it slightly, “...yes. Am I the only one who finds it sad you’re still alive? Well, you were always right about one thing; no one does trouble like we do. But really Dallyrasse, do remind me to murder you once this is over, if I have the time. All these anecdotes from our shared past are making me nauseous.”

 

“You could alleviate that in your new derby. It would save your wife the trouble of shooting it, since you actually look good in the thing. That must have been traumatic for you, losing your favorite plaything to the Whore of Babylon on at least three separate occasions.”

 

Quiet fades into something Else then, in the dim lighting skirting the hall of fitting rooms.

 

Then it comes, a hoarse, foreboding whisper in the darkness of mood.

 

“What?”

 

“I am not repeating myself like one of your little pets. Make a decision.”

 

“No, I didn’t mean you. I thought I heard it talking to me. Nevermind. Did you call River Song a whore? How invigorating. I was waiting for someone to do it. That bum alone... she has to be some kind of exotic evil. That hair... it’s like...”

 

“...it’s the hormones, you know, making you curse like that. That shard of Zagreus must have been sub-dimensionally attached to you for –some- time, long enough to plant suggestions and then carry them out once you were trapped in this Flesh. Perhaps the Doctor knew this would happen.”

 

“Of course he did, he’s ME!” the Valeyard squeals, rubbing himself as a sudden twinge cramps its way up his spine by way of his stomach, “...Um, Rassilon? I think I’ll go with the shirt I liked a few minutes ago. I... feel weird. Like mini Cthulhu is trying to make my guts into sausage suddenly.” He turns, and places a hand on the edge of the doorway, ignoring the sharp slice of the door as it bites a tiny chunk of his hand away in a flurry of blood drops. “This place is cold. I want to get away from here.”

 

“All right,” Rassilon agrees smoothly, “...put your clothes on; we’ll go when you’re ready. I’ll ask the ship to build a small, heated zero room for you.”

 

He comes out fifteen minutes later, grey trousers, grey suit, grey vest, grey patterned shirt with tiny plaid. Pale grey stockings. Nice laced grey shoes on his heels and a tidy grey derby sticking between his fingers. One hand holds an umbrella instead of a stick, also grey. All to match the dark circles puffing like honeypot ants under his eyes.

 

The hat he tosses from his hand as he takes a further step into Rassilon’s line of sight, then adjusts the grey bowtie at his neck.

 

“Screw the derby,” he mutters, clicking a heel down into the icy ground like a giddy tapper, “... he’s the one with the hat fetish. I just like to watch her shoot at him- why she keeps missing I can never understand.”

 

“I see.”

 

Tapping a finger astride of his nose like a gangly, indifferent emo Santa, he adjusts the red boutonniere kerchief at his right breast pocket then follows Rassilon back the way the other Time Lord had come from his landing position.

 

So there it is. He’s finally on his way to see that annoying junk heap again.

 

Perhaps if he’s very very good and not remotely horrid, perhaps the Old Girl might grant him a hit of Temporal Grace, a temporary stay of fate before he is transformed into the Nightmare Child’s microwave dinner. How grotesquely boring. And how necessary.

 

What he wouldn’t have given, had he still cared, for a chance to feel what it was like not to give a damn for or even know what was necessary.

 

Sometimes a man lives too long.

 


	7. A Cupidian Beast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Most Dangerous Game.

Borusa applies her foot again, kicking the worn and rust-edged medical console she has found in the generic old TT capsule’s silvery shell, that sleeping ruins in her memory from so long ago.

 

Finally, the diagnostic screens erupt into sputtering life, collecting the light until they provide her waiting eyes with a burned out, vague outline of a nondescript naked woman.

 

The gist of the data-corrupt primary scan reads,

 

L1L3^, L^ST PY+H1^.

 

PR3G&^&\+ 8Y 0LM3GH1D0R^

 

^ $1&GL3 M^L3 3M8RY0.

 

The other scan’s basics echo the preceding outline’s, but paint a different picture than the first.

 

L1L3^: FL3$H ^V^T^R.

 

$U8J3CT C0D3&^M3:

 

T1RC0$13LJ^RM1&Y^E81M.

 

$U8-D3$1G&^+3:

 

C0$$13.

 

$U8-$U8 D3$1G&^+3:

 

W1F3 0F R^$$1L0N.

 

F^L$1FY PR3G&^-CY 1& PR0GR-$$.

 

^U+H0R1Z^+10& C0D3 F0R P^R+1^L +3RM1NAT1ON OF PR0J3C+:

 

.314X4%%%t^^^&hbnfhdf0$W1&gast4w53utejghnb....

 

JJJ*666...696725(d3Ex2)437-1... 803$H^&3-Apple-Three....

 

$URV3Y $^Y$:

 

“42.”

 

...

PR1M^RY 08J3C+1V3:

 

PtQ: CH3CKM^+3 1& +HR33.

 

C0MPL3+10& $+^+U$ 0F PR1M^RY 08J3C+1V3:

 

42%...D^+^ C0RRUP+ ????????????...

 

C^U$3 0F P^R+1^L PR0J3C+ +3RM1&^+10&:

 

C0MPL3+10& $+^+U$ 0F $#C0&D^RY 08J3C+1V3:

 

 C0MPL3+3; $U8J3C+$ H^V3 $UCC3$$FULLY L3F+ 0R81+.

 

C^LL$1G& 0F ^DM1& C0RRUP+3D; ^PPR0X1M^+3 $U8$+1+U+10& ^$ F0LL0W$:

 

D3L+^CU83DS!GM^CH1SQU^R3D.

 

Blink.

 

Blink.

 

Flicker.

 

The lights illuminating the displays abruptly start plopping in and out of sync like little fishes playing in a narrow stream.

 

Finally, they dim.

 

Then the screens follow the lights into death, blipping once or twice with little hopping lines, before winking off.

 

Borusa’s wayward feet drag her shivering bum behind her until she hits what must be a wall.

 

But the wall slides into darkness, revealing the ambling space, hidden and ample, of a whole new room to her disabused spine, and as she contemplates the navigation of its dusty floor, she muses on the curious nature of certain revelations.

 

It is invariably curious that the scans are just lying there, waiting to flicker on, to be read, even if it -is- her own dream.

 

And curious indeed the scans should read in English, a human language, when she has never seen or read it, to her knowledge.

 

But most curious of all; that she would know one way or the other.

 

Curious.

 

But nowhere near surprising.

 

 


	8. Who Killed Kenny?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ego death.

Gutarriezknindracastorblyledgespillioth picks up his feet against the dismal mountain backdrop of curtaining peaks and weathered tyrant hills looming diminutively at his right.

 

To his left, the grey and winding path back to the Citadel. As he stares, it traipses away from him, through rough cables of dense shrubbery, a wall-thick hedge that had risen to the middle of a man in places, sewn through with the dangling occasions of abyssal blue weeds and the silvery crawl of glittering lichen.

 

He turns toward his destination, eyes ambling up a particular slope on a particularly flattened hill where the Shrine of the Pythia stands like a watchfire, the ephemeral tower of cloudy wood and vibrant stones forever out of the reach of children and fortune hunters. His fingers turn in the pockets of his travelling robe; it’s a nice robe, shifty and utile- it blends with the landscape using subtle fibers like tiny lenses made of thin carbon... at least that’s what the blue note he found in his pocket said.

 

The note sticks to his fingers even now...another one of those things... what did the man call them? Sticky notes. Post-its, even.

 

As he slides his way down a bank of fine grey blow and tiny cracked stones, his upper body rattles wetly.

 

A scraping sound.

 

Not long then, he muses, touching two fingertips to his chest; he shouldn’t breathe in too much of that dust. It isn’t really dust, you know. More like ashes, of Daleks, Time Lords... probably others.

 

The ten billion, perhaps? Best not to dwell on a phrase shrouded in mystery, he thinks, as he considers the dark, and weighs it against the pain which will surely well on the Doctor’s face if ever he should ask.

 

His footsteps echo briefly through the flows, edging little seconds of terraces into the shifting breath of grey that covers everything along the narrow ridges in the area.

 

“...the man will tell me when he’s ready,” he murmurs to himself, carefully placing another step against the dune-y fine grit of the hills.

 

“Tell you what, traitor?” comes a stolid voice from the heights trumpeting dimly to his south-west now.

 

He is Gutarriezknindracastorblyledgespillioth. Kenny to his friends. What will happen will not happen because of him.

 

And so he smiles, and takes another step, breaking into a run against the grey, toward the bastion, the edge of reason ringed in stone and harboring the man he’s come to find.

 

A click rounds on him from the high place, encroaching.

 

Tch.

 

Tch-tch.

 

His feet carry him closer to the tower shrine where she looms, a curtain of hewn rock, a barrier against the soft and deathly grey. Blood spits from his chest like a gull diving for fish off some cliff, becoming a line across the stones of the Shrine as he falls, pitching forward on stumbling, climbing toes.

 

On and on he pitches- forward, deep, straining blindly into the dark.

 

He’s been murdered.

 

“Doctor!” he cries against the wood of the double ingress, his red wet teeth dripping gore as he slathers the carvings of deer and trees with blood; his mind remakes them into a white orchard, dropping limbs as pickers fester among the rotted fruit and tease amongst themselves that there’s going to be a next year, with no pestilence to plague them.

 

Boots crunch close, closer, travel-heels grinding together gravel and grey grey dust like the butts of hard leather pestles.

 

Clumps of fingers threaten violence across his long green hair, grabbing his scalp by the eyelids and an ear.

 

“Doctor! I’m...”

 

Somewhere above, in the tower itself, stained glass showers the grey dust below, evoking a futile sort of rainbow.

 

As he fails, he remembers the small dock half-buried in well-sanded dust and red-and-greenage off to the right of the mountains he had watched earlier, and wonders at the depths of its belly, and shuts his eyes.

 


	9. Two Years' Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A Virgin Worth.

Jack stares.

 

In his hands, the apple grows into itself, taking on a life, each side, silver, gold, melting.

 

There’s a pool now, in his hands.

 

He looks, bending over his open hands.

 

 The liquid is cold, slightly sweet-smelling.

 

Still separate in his hands though, the gold and silver side by side, untouching, like an explosive gum. Or the vinegar in a cryptex.

 

The fluid moves with his hands, flowing smoothly as one body, like the mercury in an old thermometer; there is something otherworldly about the way it seems to... look at him.

 

One of his eyes peers from the silver on the left, the other is waiting, just as demurely, in the gold floating on the right.

 

Absently he wonders what would happen if they...

 

 The liquids melt together, swirling together and within like a ba gua sand plate.

 

Each eye of the ba gua winks at him suddenly, forcing him to blink and stumble, dumping the twin waters over himself as his arms fly backward.

 

When he opens his eyes again, he is on Boeshane.

 

Five years old...

 

His mother is washing him in a tub...

 

Boeshane was a backwater, until the Time Agency showed up.

 

The water flows over his face, blinding him. Stinging.

 

He is standing in front of his father, with twenty year old hands holding tightly to a document, while a fifteen year old’s fractured ambition burns lines down his face.

 

The water stings again.

 

This time, they are both with him. Watching. Standing.

 

His mother has those eyes, those ancient eyes. She might have had wings, in the right light sometimes, standing there, washing things in the pans. They both liked things old school.

 

His father, tall and dusty, is telling him something about when they immigrated here...

 

But they would- they were grateful to be there.

 

“...the Other,” Jack hears him say, “... the Other brought us here to keep us safe, but we have to go back... we have to save him now; he’s not the Other anymore and he needs us. Please...”

 

“But I need you,” Jack hears himself say, as a younger Jack slumped and clutching younger fists and clapping them open again on dusted nut brown hair greyless and slightly bleached by long hours under alien suns.

 

“Gray needs you more... a travelling physician made our golden wedding rings, you remember? We gave them back to him, like he asked. And he never asks. So, we have to go... we have to go so we can be there for the man who gave you to us... because we couldn’t... because of what was taken...”

 

His parents trail off, echoes now, no longer vibrant. No longer present and breathing in the shadow of the old barn-ship.

 

He blinks back tears that blast his skin like seething embers, trying to see through the sudden uptwist of dust.

 

Though her body is absent from the scene, the trace of his mother’s fingers remains along his strong chin as she guides his face toward a shadow sitting behind her in the dark, swaying softly in a creaking rocker.

 

Hunched in the chair is the figure of a young man, the pear of his pregnant torso heaving beneath a striped shirt, pricking up the edges of a plum tweed jacket close to popping buttons, despite its not being done up. There is a bruise-colored bowtie on the floor next to a lonely black boot; a leg with fine hairs on it squirms out straight from the trousers leg, scuffing itself on the edge of the rocker’s worn seat, the toes curling and spreading next to the other foot, which is flattening itself against the replica wood plank flooring.

 

His father’s hand holds a cloth to the man’s forehead.

 

One peridot eye gleams from beneath the cloth; it finds Jack and slams him in the guts like a homemade shiv.

 

“He’ll be back soon, Jack,” the gasping man says softly as he labors, “...I’m sorry but I can’t talk to you now. I have to concentrate on this...” He tries for a smile, then turns away to scream soundlessly into Jack’s father’s chest.

 

‘Let him be, my lonely boy,” the Woman, his mother, suddenly breathes as she looks at Jack square, with oldness in her eyes and face, her hair brown and curled, her body weighted by the harshness of a feminine pantsuit.

 

His father...the Man had always had a touch of blonde to his hair. It shows up now, in the light Jack’s mother is shining on his father’s face... as he clutches the scrabbling fingers of the younger man in his birth throes.

 

Soon it is early morning, and the bony young man is standing by the window, touching the one pane that never got fixed; there is a sharp jut of wood there, forming a cross that shades a part of that strange and youthful face. The man adjusts his bowtie, pulling it into meticulous place above his chest. His tweed and shirt and trousers and boots are all in place; it’s time to snap his suspenders and leave.

 

“Thank you, old friend,” Jack’s mother says, her younger appearance returning with arms full of two little boys in the quiet of the empty room. The young man’s footsteps echo against the dust, then disappear with a mechanical, familiar wheeze, like the air-boom dance of two freighters colliding.

 

Jack’s father echoes her.

 

Jack closes his eyes, murmuring to himself, “...oh god. So -that’s- why...”


	10. Finding Namo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor’s Bromide 11. What? He wasn’t in Lunar 2?

Borusa gets up, applies small hands to dusty rump and smacks vigorously, the backways of her mind anxious to crawl through any shiny refuse still hiding.

 

There are panels, dimly outlined along the chair rails... she can just make out some oddly placed roundels dotting the higher portions of wall.

 

Vines play a withered brown symphony across the floor, and, she imagines, everything else; her toes find the occasional leaf or rough bit of nib as she scuffs her way around, one finger to the wall for guidance and her nose in the air.

 

Borusa sniffs, smelling a sudden something perhaps jarred by her entry and her movements.

 

It is a sweet yet savory scent, dotted with the sleepy scenery of herbal teas and the simmering anticipation of bubbling meat being stewed off the bone, the ripe apology of ready fruit hanging low on a dark, wet branch.

 

The smells entrance like the shine of knives against bare skin.

 

So sharp.

 

Too sharp- needles in the flesh.

 

Borusa concentrates on clearing the fog of dim lighting, imagining a surplus of small lamps hanging in mid-air, bobbing a little as though borne up by the surface of a water unknown to gravity.

 

The room begins to light... soft echoes of brightness spill suddenly into everywhere, flanking Borusa’s little body in bars of uneven...

 

Pink?

 

“It’s... not a stone I would have equated with you, my boy,” she murmurs flatly as she turns around.

 

There is an overlarge quartz, rosy in color and point, suspended over a hole in the engine room floor.

 

It is quite uniform, to the eyes, this mutant crystal, and glows with a subtle, clean force reminiscent of older days beneath Gallifrey’s suns, before the stupidity.

 

Inside the pinkish interior, there rests the fearsome form of her former student at his most demure; arms in tweed crossed over a chestful of pale cream shirt.

 

“It wasn’t my idea,” claims the almost idiot in the crystal, his arms unfolding like a pile of rabbits waking from an orgy, “... but look over there.”

 

One of the Doctor’s peridot eyes flicker open on his former teacher, and he grins. His fingers lift from his chest, and point to another area though, lingering in the direction Borusa had come.

 

Another crystal beckons in the hallway Borusa just fell out of.

 

Old world pink with modern lines.

 

The same one?

 

Ah.

 

Funny boy.

 

“I suppose these things will be popping up all over this place now? In various positions?” Borusa gripes as she tries not to skip over to the next pink stone.

 

She puts her fingers to this new crystal, knocking a small fist against the warm-cool glassy face.

 

“Room full of keys, my boy...” she murmurs drily as she picks her way back to the engine room, ignoring the ping of other crystals now zapping into place in every section, “...now where’s your room? The one you sleep in?”

 

The Doctor’s voice falls out clumsily from somewhere as he says, “I have no room, Borusa- I don’t control this. But you know the old saying, ‘Wherever you go, there you are.’”

 

“So where have you been, then?” Borusa smirks, plonking herself in front of the first crystal she found, the one floating in the engine room- straight, perfect... annoying.

 

“Oh you know me- everywhere, nowhere. My backyard. It’s boring. I want to go places. What happens when you’ve been everywhere? What do you do?” comes the succulent voice of her former charge, pushing his fingers through the walls of the quartz.

 

A rainbow rose is in the man’s hands; the skin is dripping blood from where a bismuth thorn has punctured it. There are many such punctures.

 

Borusa looks down at the rose, then up at her student, whose chin is wobbling like a half-broken branch in a strong wind. The eyes though, are minty emeralds flecked with gold.

 

He is pressing against the glassy crystal’s facet, staring out at her.

 

“Isn’t it obvious, silly boy?” Borusa says, keeping her vocal cadences to the quieter ranges in an attempt to soothe him, “... after you’ve gone everywhere, you spend nowhere.”

 

 “...take this. You can’t stay.”

 

He sets the Bismuth Sunrise Rose in Borusa’s hands, wraps her fingers around it, then folds himself back up again.

 

The room soon fuzzes in little shivers of glittery gleam.

 

Borusa sighs.

 

It’s time to leave.

 


	11. The Arbiter's Game

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You Beautiful Doll.

Flashback.

 

The (Flesh) Valeyard slides on his knees down the one dressing room bench that isn’t frozen, his fingers clenching the sleek invisible lines of a decent air guitar, hoping Rassilon can’t see him.

 

Easing off the bench, he applies the pressure of his breath to the dark tie dangling at an apropos angle off his head and sticks his eyes out the burnt-gold edges of the window-door, to look for the man.

 

Yep. Same spot. The fiend, in plain view across the street, like a winsome pervect.

 

‘Are you done yet?’ the man’s very posture seems to call out casually, not looking up from its fingernails.

 

The Flesh Valeyard ignores him in favour of ducking back into the dressing room and stuffing his shirt down his trousers like a good little boy.

 

“We must be clean, for a pic-a-nic, after all,” he singsongs to himself, reaching down to tug the trousers the rest of the way over his hips and on top of the wibbly shirt.

 

His fingers find the small lump become belly, and he sighs.

 

“What is it you want from me? I can’t understand you. Well, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll give you Mehgudi, when this is over...” he murmurs, smiling down at his body, “...you think you’ll like that? If you think I’m doing a belt with this, you’re dreaming.”

 

He finds himself wanting to touch.

 

Wanting to caress, despite himself.

 

He floats his fingers over the bump again, feeling his mouth curving upward in a smile.

 

“Ah, well...” he reasons as he adjusts the subtle grey tie around his collar with his one free hand, “...maybe you’re not so bad...”


	12. Romulus and Remus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the Father, Nothing.

Jack reaches out...

 

The handle is chilly.

 

He pulls.

 

There is no need to open his eyes.

 

 He knows what he’ll find there.

 

Gray is in this drawer.

 

His brother, Gray.

 

His brother, who tried to murder him.

 

He opens his eyes, and tugs on the cold silvery handle.

 

Two lines above, running the length of the room.

 

A lolling red arch. Columns.

 

Too much space, and far too little.

 

The dirty, clean bricks are all around him.

 

Them.

 

It feels like a subway station down here.

 

The handle slides the drawer out like a charm, initiating a sequence of scratching sounds in the back of the catch.

 

Jack looks down.

 

Gray is lying on the table of the drawer.

 

All there.

 

The slightly thicker chin and neck, the pinched expression of a little boy who’d just found a firefly.

 

The hatred etched in lines across the marginally heavy forehead.

 

And the same brown hair.

 

There is something in his hands.

 

Jack touches his brother’s strong fingers, prying them from the long metal object they grip so tightly where they cross against Gray’s chest.

 

An infostamp, tarnished, with burn marks everywhere in rough smudges of black.

 

There is a blue post-it attached.

 

Blank.

 

“So this speaks for itself, huh?” Jack muses aloud, turning the infostamp up to the lights and twisting it on.

 

An image of his mother, older.

 

That pant suit again. A string of lovely pearls.

 

Now she is in a red robe, with many others in similar robes.

 

Now there is a man.

 

His father. Red robes.

 

His mother. His father.

 

Red Robes.

 

They are standing, no, walking, through a roundish portal flickering with unstable energies.

 

 There are two men; the Master. The tenth Doctor, holding an old pistol, shaking. The Master is holding a diamond.

 

“Get out of the way,” he says, eyes meeting the Doctor’s.

 

The Doctor slips to the side of the scene, away from the leader of the Red Robes.

 

Then the Master is screaming at the leader, saying, “...you did this to me!”

 

The Master’s fingers emit a rough blue lightning, so many times until the leader of the Red Robes falls to his knees.

 

A blur of light swallows them all, except the Doctor and the old man in the tube behind.

 

Soon they too are swallowed.

 

His mother flickers back again... blindfolded, being led to a strange machine at the heart of a giant tree.

 

They push her in.

 

His father, also blindfolded, is led to a different tree.

 

They push him in.

 

The Master is wearing a golden sash; it is fluttering behind him as he runs.

 

He billows shabbily down a long hall before coming to a fork. His head bobs achingly between the two divergences.

 

He chooses one path, follows it to a door.

 

Now he is standing before this door, his fists plunging weakly against the locks, his hair disheveled.

 

The scene melts away, like little bubbles.

 

Jack blinks, then looks at the blue post it again.

 

It says something now.

 

‘Redrum is the sound of another man’s tears.’


	13. Blue Footed Booby Prize

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Harpy Chord of the Rings.

‘Claris’ Claristellaniktilineacruxellavanjee takes off his helmet, breathes, then applies his knuckled and gloved fist to Her door.

 

Soon, the demure, unassuming portal slides open, followed by the whizz-by presence of a large tibia recently gnawed.

 

“Clarence, come here,” waves a grey, leathery voice some would argue had the consistency of hot needles, “...what news did you bring me?”

 

Claris sighs, then pitches his find into her room, head first.

 

The Doctor feels the smushing singe of carpet burn slough off half his face as he hits the floor, arms around his stomach.

 

A squeal erupts from the Pythia’s blackened mouth, like a little dog being squeezed.

 

“Oh, and what is this? Clarence, you have brought me my dance partner!” she beams, cutting a predatory circle around the Doctor, her naked black feet decorated in ankle-bracers strung with the  long and tiny skulls of several unfortunate tafelshrews.

 

The Doctor’s eyes flirt with the macabre ankle decorations, tensing for an opening as the Pythia leans down to unbutton his nice white shirt.

 

“Hello, darling. How was Jersey?” he murmurs, applying a grin in her general direction and adding just a touch of forehead crease for the requisite lemon slice.

 

While his brain concentrates on the box sitting on the Sepulchasm table behind her, his face remains focused on hers. Waiting. Not daring to enjoy the moment until it actually comes.

 

“Are you thinking of making for it?” the Pythia asks, puffing out her bottom lip as she presses a foot to his naked stomach and leans into his flesh.

 

“Ow. Why should I? I’m putty in your gams. Erm, hams. Hands?”

 

“Always children’s games with you! “ she cries, throwing her mouth wide in delight, her fangs catching the ambient rays like pearls, “...but I am well amused, this day. You are here in front of me so easily, which means you are a Danger. Speak. What do you want? I am a merciful goddess.”

 

The Doctor laughs, and the sound rings like death tolls through the room before spilling into the hallway.

 

“What could you possibly give me? You have the Rose Rings. But you should have checked the Shrine sooner. I was nearly gone by the time they found me.” With a grunt, he turns himself onto his hip, showing the woman a purple splotch of bruise along one side of his modest bump formerly hidden by his shirt. “Your pet guards gave me quite the kick. Does that please you?”

 

“CLARENCE!” the Pythia yelps, “Mother is cross with you.”

 

One claw-hand goes up, clenching into an onyx fist with long curling fingernails of dubious frailty and a fractal, odd scaliness.

 

Bzzt.

 

Clarence is a pile of clothes and helmet at the entryway.

 

“Nice bit,” the Doctor murmurs, giggling slightly, “...he was gonna betray you eventually. You ‘do’ know that, right?”

 

 

“You are a vicious man, Doctor,” the Pythia quips, grinning out from her mouthful of white sharp fangs, “... the Other had issues, but you... oh you! Such a ‘good’ little boy you’ve been! Mommy wants to give you a present!”

 

She licks against her gleaming teeth now, her dark eyes widening like onyx under water in the dark.

 

“I’ll pass, thanks!” the Doctor says cheerfully, “...but I brought one for you!”

 

He smiles at her brightly, his big eyes spongy green suns watching her movements.

 

Then a long metal object begins to grow out of his hand, which is, strangely, as white as the object itself.

 

The Pythia stops laughing.

 

Instead, she watches him, a bird with a snake.

 

Or is it a snake with a bird?

 

“Kaku Inko, Mehgudi...” the Doctor whispers, as the sonic probe which rose out of his hand begins to scream its waves in every direction.

 

The Pythia, though unencumbered by the frequency emitter of the Time Lord’s toy, looks down at him, a feeling of unsettling nature growing against her ribs like some malign fungus.

 

Abruptly he bursts into a splatter of white thick fluid that splashes around her feet and crawls to a stop around her bare toes. He’s on everything. On everything. The pest. Did he just commit suicide? –Him?-

 

She scrabbles out of the liquid, staring down at it... then her eyes slide half-closed at her stupidity and she gathers herself, rushing to the box she set on the Sepulchasm table.

 

The Rose Rings...

 

Her fingers click the catch on the little white box, not bothering to caress the finely polished bone this time as she has so many times before. No. she is intent on revealing relief to herself, in the form of her prize.

 

But when the lid lifts, there are two ring-shaped dents in the soft silk, each dent empty of a Rose Ring.

 

Each dent, furthermore, filled with the damning white fluid.

 

Her eyes turn red as she pitches the box out into the hallway, her furious screeches storming through the halls before her own angry feet as though they are not merely herald of some mad and violent bird, but rather the bird themselves.


	14. Club Gingerbread

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Lion and the Unicorn.

River fingers the note he gave her, stepping carefully against the thick snow coating every corner of the place in a crust of crunchy frost. 

‘Hang ten at the unicorn; the fiddler’s still on the roof.’

Huh.

She smiles, cocking her head a little as she reaches for the door and pulls it open.

“I thought you didn’t play anymore...” she says, idly brushing off her purple gloves as she lets another smile curtain her features.

No answer, but a scrap of Hanzi paper seal flaps free of the building’s bricking and swoops against her cheek. 

She smiles again, and looks inside before stepping up the one little wooden step and in through the entryway.

Glancing up out of habit, she spies a coats rack near the edge of the left-opening door; long, wooden... a nice smooth cherry, liquid and dark against the pale grey of the inside walls. 

Thirteen steel hooks.

She counts them.

There is a black undertaker’s cravat hanging on the first one. A well-loved fur with a dark collar on the second. The third bears an opera jacket... the fourth, a 20-foot long scarf with seven stripes, and a velvet fedora with a painter’s pin.

River Song knows where this is going. She guessed the riddle several months ago.

Her softly rooting fingers cling to every inhabitant of the long two-by-four piece of carved and polished wood skewered with hooks. And as she gentles each guest with fingertips, nails and nose, she continues the count.

Fifth hook... it holds a stylized Victorian cricketer’s kit, all buttercream and lines of 70’s orange. And those horrendous striped trousers... ah.

Six holds a rainbow-patch coat that seems high on some kind of illegal substance.

The seventh hook sports a sweater with question marks, an umbrella. A panama.  
The eighth bears a velvet waistcoat; there is a pocket watch hanging over top of it, tarnished and broken. The lovely face, it seemed, suffered a peculiar crack and stopped ticking a long time ago, at three o’clock.

There is a black leather jacket partially dangling off the ninth hook. It’s slightly burnt.

River reaches for the tenth, locked into the pattern now as she digs in her pocket for the capsule. 

Once it’s in her hand again, she clicks it open. The hollow little silvery pill pops like a gelatin tablet, revealing two halves and a tiny violin.

The violin grows in her hands, sliding up and out and in and through in effigy, the love child of a wooden kinoko puzzle and a kinetic sculptor. 

The ancient, smooth wood cracks and pulls, diving out of itself to re-carve its bridge.

Strings twang in exhausting cacophony, screeching like monstrous angels the size of small pin heads.

The Unicorn seems to shiver under the call of the untwisting fiddle, shaking nearer. Crawling away.

Hovering in limbo.

Beams crack and squeal like pirouetting trees before the foreboding march of timber harvesters.

Tumblers dance on shelves, evoking the silence found only in the shattering of glass.

Finally, the vital, sentient instrument is alive again. 

River sets the Violin, Kaku Inko, to her nostrils and draws in the lush, seasoned nasality of its presence.

There is a sweet and feral touch to the blush of some old woods, and the Violin bears up this standard like no other Earthly creature of hew and turn.

She takes the bridge end, then grabs the velvety cravat eyeing her with its diamond pin from the eighth hook.

Her fingers weave the jewel-pinned, olive brown succulence of tied silk under the strings of the Violin, wrapping the scroll, neck and pegs for several seconds before letting go and stepping back to admire her work.

“That should do,” she says, looking on the only window of the Unicorn.

It’s stained glass, lead-lined. Eloquent. Pre-Raphaelite, probably, judging by the sheer amount of blue and red, white, and yellow.

The namesake beast out of Physiologus kneels in the lap of a coin-haired maid, its body drawn in long, lean cuts of cream and white.

The girlish figure is full, shaped by an array of silvery pearl hues and gold-etched misgivings. The face looks suspiciously like River’s own.

River bends to touch her fingers to the glass animal, fixing the subtle colors of him with a discerning eye.

Her fingertips trace the soft swirl of beard at his long equine chin and find a surprising bit of purple folding there, hidden behind the cool yellow daisy dangling from the woman’s upraised hand, the head sticking nonchalantly out of the unicorn’s noble and nibbling maw. 

“You and your bowties, Sweetie,” River Song murmurs as she applies her cherry red lips to the window, then leaves the way she came, with the fine old glass wearing a full and juicy carnival apple kiss upon her timely departure, “... good night.”


	15. Black Ice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ace of Wands.

The left sonic probe still is sitting there, some few hours after the processional of two men who used to know each other and might-again, silver-long, crisp-lined and bisquey against a bit of banked snow the height of a man’s large boot.

 

The green light flickers on occasion, blinking morse code onto the bright eyes of the shopping area.

 

And that particular limey sort of green showers the pedestrian walkways, the sighing sidewalks, the leafy sausage parkways lined with topiaries for the tourists... with a kind of breezy sentimental sort of missive, granting a dubious absolution of iniquities to the empty lots and abandoned hovercars and half-open slide-doors left lonely in the wake of All That Ice like a rainstorm after zombie season.

 

But when first it was flown to the gerund ground, it rolled like a primitive circus, flashing its portentous eye all over the low road, seeking no favour from the area other than the simple clarification of its own existence.

 

And even that is gone now.

 

It isn’t rolling anymore, either.

 

When it stopped, it struck the toe of the Flesh Valeyard’s rumbling masterpiece, a throaty naked foot made of unnaturally hewn ice fashioned into man’s primal nightmare, that most frightful figure of woman.

 

A very particular woman.

 

Wings emitted from her back like tree trunks, somber, grasping.

 

Two vicious arms played a frozen game of Red Light, Green Light in the aching darkness, that alone time between apartment building and shop when all the neighbors still don’t know you and it’s a dismal one after midnight.

 

Cold wrinkles like wet candles flaming up scantily dressed old-time arches, inked along her passageways by years of stolen time, whiled away in a roc’s egg.

 

But the heat of the light, the green song, had fallen over her once the sonic had been dropped.

 

-Had been- dropped.

 

It was dropped, and it still lit and blinked and flashed, for a while.

 

Enough to sear her with its little fire-shadow.

 

And how that fire-shadow climbed up her well-turned calf! The son of a sundial and a dreamy archaeologist.

 

So yes, the sonic is still there, setting back a bit into its place of honour, the tiny indent it made in the ice.

 

And she?

 

Well, she is not in well standing anymore; barely a witchy puddle, really.

 

Hot tears can do that, in a pinch.

 


	16. Through Me, Thy Blue Heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Those who are with us always.

Flashback.

 

Stepping against shifty clumps of red grass sitting ripe in the crumble of rocky gravel-silt hillside, a figure in a greyish dust cloak clings to the opposite wind, falling into its flare of biting cold air brushing up from the mountains to the north.

 

 Down in the dust-ash bowl below him, there is a lonely dock building, half-buried in the fine grit of sand-like soil.

 

Sensing no more worries in his future, he makes his way to the stout spiral ruin set into the trickle down hill on the far end of the bowl, the Shrine.

 

The slightly isosceles bulk of the sonic rifle he shoulders with ease, dropping into a lurching stride toward the body lying just outside the leggy tower doors carved with rutting animals.

 

His feet mark the way, shifting halfway into the piling grey dust to make sidereal half-melted cups full of boot in the dunes.

 

He pushes his fingers against the smooth doors, his hands managing a carved breast and some kind of foreign meat from the surprises hewn into the stone of the two portals.

 

The twin vestibule flaps open on an oblivion of dust and dead leaves, and he finds himself wondering what the old ones had been thinking, serving the bitch back when.

 

He takes the stairs over a barrel, hopping up each delicately carved step as though each were a bed notch rather than a precisely hewn masterpiece cut from the bedrock of what had once been a deep and thunderous sea.

 

His eyes, as he climbs, do not glimpse the myriad of corals perched in loving screams against the infinite wisdom of the limestone walls, curled in rictus, frozen in a wasteland, unmoving amongst countless varieties of extinct fish.

 

No. He himself is committed to a single act of murder against the man lying in repose on a stone bench some fifty footsteps away.

 

He can see the man sleeping there, his white shirt close to his chest but for a hand against the unnatural bulge of his stomach. Soon he gets to one knee on the second to last step, sets the rifle to his aiming shoulder again, clicks the catch, pulls the primer switch on the tannish shell of the pulse-scaling vascillator, and...

 

A finger-shaped pressure on his opposite shoulder drive shim to sheath every noise he might make too suddenly; his breathing becomes a memory under such a grasp. His thoughts escape like little bits of char afore a fire.

 

“You won’t be needing that thing where you’re going, Ykarcynthioncalavishtarmiotracolix- give it here.”

 

The soft voice comes to him from the side, whispering into his ear like the sweet air of a puppet as hands slide like scurrying tafelshrews along the braces and barrels and catches of the sonic rifle, disarming it.

 

“Are you going to kill me like me like you killed the Ten Billion, my Lord?” Ykar asks, reaching up to cover the Doctor’s strangely gentle hand where it lies against his cheek with his own.

 

Funny, so funny, Ykar realises, as he considers the fact of such a pause... the Doctor’s hand is not moved from the bench, but Ykar can feel his presence behind him as surely as if he were truly standing there now.

 

“I’m very cross with you just now, so I’m not at liberty to say... go to sleep and we’ll see in the morning.”

 

Ykar closes his long eyelashes over his eyes then falls down the stairs, a tumbling weed as his bones and body ricochet bluntly off the stones of the walls. A crack is heard- his neck, catching itself on the last step.

 

Krrik.

 

The Doctor sighs, then reaches for the wall nearest his free hand. His dull peridot eyes and limbs, heavy with too much sleep, glance limply toward the leaning shadow groping along the opposite span of wall-stone.

 

“Kenny?” he breathes, huffing slightly with the effort as he sits up on the bench.

 

The other man does not answer, but his fine length of emerald hair bobs like a fiddlehead fern, dripping blood in all the particulate places, and dangles a lovely bit of gory scalp, besides. His long hands meddle idly with his chest, pressing here and there with flighty, numb-ed movements.

 

“You don’t have long- all right all right, I’m coming, don’t do anything!” the Doctor murmurs, sliding off the bench and rushing to wrap his elbows around the man’s waist, the Rose Ring on his finger sliding somewhat in the drain of Kenny’s body fluid down onto him.

 

Together they drag down the stairs; the Doctor holds his elbow to the stones, hoping for a...

 

“One, two, three, four... five... got it!” he cries, breathing hard under Kenny’s extra weight as a catch clicks somewhere and one of the old grey blocks retreats into the wall, disappearing most of two fossilized conch, a fist of tiny anemones and a spray of plankton.

 

Predictably, a secret staircase ambles down into darkness.

 

“The trap door to the Hennal Bay Docks is just a little down here... my boy, just... try to keep up...” the Doctor gasps as he drags Kenny with the aid of the walls down the roundish tunnel, which dangles a plethora of old dead roots and strange stone figures of people with rounded heads.

 

Sweat spills from his hair, stinging his eyes with his own salt as he struggles along the narrow way.

 

Suddenly, a singular and damningly painful unpleasantness erupts along his left psoas, a uniquely unforgettable annoyance obviously originant in the non-extant Gallifreyan equivalent of the wolffian duct, as it bites at him with flailing nerve-ending fangs more relation to the blades of some sharp knife given leave to plunge into his back then mere mortal autonymous tissue.

 

“Kenny...” he murmurs, adjusting the man’s mostly unconscious body and hanging his mouth wide open to catch the most oxygen with each step as he breaths and moves, breathes and moves, breathes and moves toward the dim square of light falling down the steps at the end of the tunnel, “... I’m having a few minor pains, just a little bit of difficulty, just wanted to let you know! We’ll be at the trap door before you know it, just a few... more... steps, just a few... more... steps! Just... don’t regenerate... on me yet, I don’t... think I can... I think I can... I think!”

 

The tunnel’s egress looms closer, a right angle mouth of scornful pyrite teeth.

 

 The Doctor decides the trap door must be mocking him as he leans Kenny’s briefly stirring shape against the wall full of strange globe-headed figures again, this time near the musty exit step stones, then clambers up, hoping to apply himself to the lovely exit trap and win a prize.

 

Sweat slicks his hands however, and when he presses his full weight up against the sticking door in a Brazilian high kick he has absolutely no business trying in his state, instead of the lock giving, he feels another pain charge its way through from spine to nethers, and he falls down the stairs, back into the greyish brownish dust, right where he left Kenny.

 

 As the Doctor looks at Kenny’s fish-gaping lips, a small stream of light steals across the man’s tongue and through his staring eyes, filling his mouth with infelicitous gold beams that pour from him.

 

“Oh damn, oh damn! Kenny you wake up this insta-”

 


	17. Por Palfour, or, Capistrano

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The chicken has a gun.

“I was about to come and fetch you...” Rassilon says softly, turning from where’s he’s been leaning on the TARDIS.

 

The Flesh Valeyard glares at Rassilon, then throws his elbows out in a grin of sinew, reaching up to pull on the dangling ends of his undone silk tie, a study in grey.

 

A shadow falls across them both then, climbing the snow drifts above them, an unexpected sundial.

 

A shadow in a flowing twist of robes... and a long... hooked...

 

Beak?

 

Roda Palfour’s long bony bird-fingers conspire around the handle of a pulse pistol from the safety of his overlarge sleeves. He waves it at them, his lengthy bird-head cocking incongruously to the left, like a bobble-head doll, his sunken eyes more sunken than they had been.

 

The Flesh Valeyard feels a chill run over his spine; he hears himself say, “...Oh, Roda...” Then he sways, clutching his head.

 

Rassilon daren’t take a step toward him though, as Roda’s shadow crawls closer into the light, waving that tepid projectile. Not yet- there is a scene to be played out, here.

 

Roda pokes the gun in the Flesh Valeyard’s ribs; the man does nothing, being hunched over, his hands weaving a tight basket ‘round his head as though his temples are imploding. His cane flies out of his hand, falling and clunking some ten footsteps away.

 

“I notice, Time Lord, that your aged hand is caught in the hem of your shirt- surely you feel no pity for this murderous creature?” Roda quails dizzily, beating the Flesh Valeyard over the head with the pulse pistol before shoving the weapon into the man’s stomach and clicking back the last catch.

 

“Indeed. You fail...” Rassilon says, keeping hold of the hem of his shirt to which he has been clutching fast. He takes a step toward the monk, whose slender long bird-limbs are quivering under the weight of the bulky pistol, “...to ascertain one... vital fact.”

 

The bird monk sighs. The top and bottom of his long dry beak shiver apart, revealing rows of tiny egg-teeth and a dangling, equally querulous long tongue.

 

“And what is that, most ancient and revered Time Lord?” Roda pipes, caressing the Flesh Valeyard’s struggling upper body with the butt of the pistol and his free claw, tracing the pregnant man roughly, as some drawing made in a picture book with a chunk of charcoal. “I intend on leaving this place. The others are frozen; my contact... my contact has promised me death in a place far from the drone of the ancient dead sea I have guarded with my brethren. I am inclined to take him up on his offer.”

 

Then he smacks his long forearm front to back, raking the Flesh Valeyard’s knees into his elbow-y grasp and knocking the man down.

 

The Flesh Valeyard’s abused patellas hit the ground and thud, sliding wildly apart so that they slip him off-balance on the thick, sludgy ice. He coasts along a ways, glaring as his body follows its own momentum toward the direction his cane went earlier.

 

His fingers make a cracking sound beneath him.

 

Although, Rassilon notices with patient glee, they also seem to be curled around his cane.

 

If a man is going to do it, it should be now, at a moment like this.

 

“...I am not the Doctor.” Rassilon says simply, before reaching out with a bare hand and squeezing his fingers slowly together until his nails form the little pale mouth of a fist with a crooked thumb tongue.

 

The Flesh Valeyard’s eyes bulge out at the sound of the resultant damp krikkk, and he suddenly begins to smile at Rassilon’s advancing form, despite the groans he hears coming from his own dismal ache of a throat.

 

“Good to see you’ve come in out of the cold, as well...” Rassilon murmurs, offering a hand up and a steady shoulder as the Flesh Valeyard eyes Roda’s inert body, “... at least now all three of us can quit with suffering, for the moment. Do you remember the taste of my famous recipe for stuffed cat shark? He’s stringy and... not exactly seafood, but he’ll do.”

 

Then they gather themselves through the TARDIS entry, and the Lady is happy to shut her doors behind them.

 


	18. Over Dinner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> La poule au pot tous les dimanches.

The Flesh Valeyard’s bare feet scuttle over a kitchen floor well-steeped in flour.

 

He leans, carefully propping himself in the cherry doorframe, to amuse himself and steady his nerves against the strange life wiggling inside him.

 

He leans, too, because within the kitchen, near some upper level cupboards, strong fingers are wrangling a packet of dry herbs and minding a large pot, out of which the thin, porous length of a sizeable avian bone is dangling by a bit of tough gristle.

 

He watches.

 

Still taken by that idle sense of fascination, he scratches his stomach, then smiles at the other Time Lord in his element, who doesn’t look up from the sizeable steam emanating from the big pot as he states, “... what’s eating you?”

 

“... funny. That smells good.” the Flesh Valeyard murmurs, slipping into the kitchen proper and bending slightly over the pot to catch a proper whiff. “... I still remember the first time I saw you make that stew... we were...”

 

His wrapped and fractured hand seems out of place against his shirt. He raises it, feeling that it may fly away if he doesn’t keep his eyes just so, just there, right on the... ball of his wrist.

 

There seem to be so many of his hand, all at once, echoing across his vision like an installation of modern art.

 

Rassilon takes a step closer, his hand out, reaching.

 

The Flesh Valeyard raises his hand farther up in front of his face.

 

His fingers flutter in tandem, flapping like butterfly beats against the abrupt weight of the air evacuating his lungs.

 

So heavy... that air.

 

It’s getting hard to...

 

“GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! This has to STOP NOW!” the Flesh Valeyard screams in a throat-scraping blood-hoarse tenor; his fist smacks into the frame of the door, bending the wood until little cracks and splinters shoot out across it, from it, cornering the side of his palm with sharply peppered bites of once-pithy shard.

 

He blinks and takes his hand away, lowering his fingers until Rassilon is at the soup again, and the odd buzzing in his ears has ceased to an ignorable whisper.

 

“Did you... did you say something just now, Dallyrasse?” he murmurs to the man, who is humming to himself and swinging strong hips slightly to the musical scent of his handiwork.

 

“Hrm?” Rassilon asks, holding up a ladle dripping hot stock the color of pale heaven precariously back into the pot. “... the TARDIS might have mentioned something about you owing some lascivious lothario a chicken... shall we invite him too? I daresay this is an improvement on my previous recipe.”

 

“Huh? Oh, oh yes, of course, Dallyrasse; do what you like.” The Flesh Valeyard waves the offending hand at the cook, then ambles into the sudden and inviting breakfast nook magickally inherent in a previously unoccupied corner, complete with an old diner-style pop-out table and a champagne flute chair, his widening eyes watering for the soup as he adds, “... but we get Jack after breakfast.”

 

Rassilon nods, then sets a bowl of the soup down in front of him. The word is unnecessary, but the ancient Time Lord speaks it anyway.

 

“Agreed.”

 


	19. Life is Like a Box of Chocolate... Bunnies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ice Pirate.

“That’s the Indso Tys...it looks like something Omega coughed up after he fell down the rabbit hole...” says the Flesh Valeyard, his neck craning painfully upward at the rise of brick and crystalline structure draped in ice now flickering like a ghostly rock candy on the TARDIS view screen.

 

Rassilon touches the Flesh Valeyard’s shoulder a moment, then clicks the button, shutting off the view.

 

“I believe,” he mutters demurely as he eyes the double doors at the entrance to the TARDIS, “... that the Captain is somewhere inside? Frozen, like one of those dairy treats with the stick in you ate a box of last night. I’ve never been here before; are you coming?”

 

But the space the Flesh Valeyard had been occupying near the console is empty.

 

Rustle.

 

Rustle-rustle.

 

A door to the right opens, and a mess of tan and grey fur traipses out and into the console room, bouncing jaggedly, like a dying balloon. Two pink fuzzy boots, one of which bears a large pom pom, poke out from the tall and swaying mass.

 

“What?” the Flesh Valeyard gripes from inside the hairy covering, “I’m not going out there again unless I’m reasonably assured that my toes won’t fall off.”

 

He goes to the doors, knocks once; the double entrance glides open and out, catching slightly as if the Old Girl is an old office lift instead of a time machine.

 

“Come onnnnn, then!” the Flesh Valeyard calls from outside. “Oh, look, there he is.”

 

His footsteps thud across the icy floor of the frozen museum.

 

 Rassilon takes his time, striding through the TARDIS entry just as a hard thunk settles over the white landscape of silence pervading the area, and is rewarded by a unique supplication of head, fingers, knees and toes- the amusingly prayerful position of one Flesh Avatar of a Time Lord, stuck fast to the frozen trousers of Jack Harkness.

 

“My bum hurts.” The Flesh Valeyard says softly, rubbing his behind, one reddening hand affixed to a man-sized block of cloudy ice and flesh. “And my hand is frozen to Jack’s... leg.”

 

“Hahahahah. I’ll take it from here. Back to the TARDIS with you, and thaw out your backside.” Rassilon laughs as he raises a hand and waves his fingers as if spreading cards.

 

The vaguely man-shaped block of ice with Jack in it levitates, pulling the Flesh Valeyard up onto the top as it glides through the TARDIS’ doors and into the safety of the Old Girl’s interior.

 

“You could have done this, you know!” Rassilon muses, grinning a small grin as he crosses the vestibule himself now.

 

From somewhere toasty in the TARDIS, the Flesh Valeyard’s full-lipped whinge emerges. “I’m hungry again. And Rassilon? It’s not as hard as it was before, and it’s dripping, it must be! Oh god. Oh God. Oh god, I can’t... unsee it... Rassilooooon!”

 


	20. I, Stradivarius

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Saint Michael's Day.

The blackness of space waits outside the white doors flung open to two figures, revealing all.

  

Dark bits of dust that spiral across time like skipping stones.

 

White pinpricks of stars that bloat and fade before the vision.

 

Shapes of purple and indigo and gold that sing and spin.

 

And fade.

 

And die.

 

And burn again.

 

“Heigh ho, Melty, away!” yells the Master as he flops his hand backward from the Flesh Doctor’s back.

 

The white arms flail, two doughy hands holding in their batter grasp the bow and body, respectively, of the Violin. Then the Flesh falls back, clutching the Violin in drippy fingers that spray bits of white yoghurt-y Flesh back toward Rosette’s out-flung bay doors, and begins to draw his elbow back.

 

To play.

 

“Cluck old hen!” the Master whispers a line from the old rhyme as the doors fold back inside like little origami paper folds. “Cluck and sing.” His eyes are red from facing the airlock, and burning from something far damper.

 

An image squirms into view across the screens suddenly trumpeting in silence over the surface of the white, white doors, now melted back into themselves and solid again.

 

There is the Flesh, floating there, backdropped by black, and stars.

 

The Kaku Inko is searing away the mood, the strings creating a strange kind of laterally crawling fire in the absence of air.

 

Rainbow flames burgeon left and right, in flat lines, back, forth, up, down, in a ménage-a- trois between a psychedelic trip, a positron emission topography scan and a rorschach test, creating the semblance of wings in a festive keep-away game display of optics centered around the violinist and his instrument.

 

“The link to trigger and trap the blast has been made.” the Master whispers, sinking down against the solidified doors as he watches the white streaming like salt from the Flesh and the Flesh Violin. “Now hurry on to Mount Doom, Stupid.”

 

As the white figure of Rosette’s interface grows out of the floor, and sits cross-legged there beside him, he growls at her, then lets out a deep, gasping breath and looks again at the screen.

 

It’s switched over to the red jewel of Gallifrey, the silver points of chronon mines flickering like shrapnel in orbit.

 

“How long has he got?” the Master murmurs softly.

 

“Till after the cows come home.” Rose-Rosette sighs, handing him a mug of something dark. It smells vibrant, full of spices.

 

He lifts it to his lips, swishes, and swallows.

 

“Bitter, thick and seasoned, just like good South American chocolate should be. Where did you get this? Teotihuacan?”

Rose-Rosette small-grins her plump lips into a juicy pout, then grasps the mug in her silent hands as she turns it so he can see.

 

There’s something printed on it.

 

The text reads,

 

“Death By Tesco’s.”

 

He smiles, looks over at her, then takes another sip.


	21. Oestre Bunny

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Saving Private Kenny.

The dusty, chalky smell of old plaster plays with the Doctor’s nose hairs, waking him.

 

His back is flat on the ground; there is white light everywhere, flimsy and sharp, flowing in curtains.

 

The dust is heavy in his hair; he can see it hanging like ripe grapes over his face, ready to drop and give him a coughing fit.

 

His hearts quicken in his chest, two uneven drums.

 

Beating.

 

Beating.

 

Trumpeting that old quick time down through his bones, deep into the dirt beneath his spine.

 

His fingers feel... filled, full with needles, as if someone’s dropped them in a vat of liquid nitrogen.

 

“Thank god I’m not a human then- if I had been... somebody would have died today.” he manages, curling his hand into a fist and working the nerves with a burst of will, murmuring a friendly curse to the aether. “... And lost some fingers, besides! I’ll probably have trouble with this hand for a while... I want to thank the audience, my mother and clowns.”

 

But his laughter dries in his throat, come out a hacking cackle instead, rumbling from the deeps of his gut- a mere albeit abiding desire for water, perhaps?

 

Too much dust in the lungs. He’s going to cough anyway, he realises bluntly, as his clenching fist rhythmically pulverizes the lone occupant of his palm, a bit of crunchy rock... probably once a part of the collapsed ceiling overhead. The remains of a polarizing neural confiner, basically an aluminum helmet attached to some electrode runners, a metal party straw and some kind of containment device, stick like rushed spider’s legs from underneath a couple overturned troughs.

 

“So much for the portable Flesh generator...” he murmurs, coughing again as he looks around some more.

 

His shaky eyes spy a column or two, leaning on some other column’s remains, some ten footsteps away from where he lies among the ruins of the descending passage.

 

Descending...

 

“KENNY!” he calls as loudly as he can while he struggles back up onto his front to knees and feet, swaying away from a badly cracked column perched precariously near his face.

 

The old dock is still with us, at least... he thinks to himself, lowering his bottom lip so he can mouth breathe despite his digging fingers in the dust.

 

Pausing only once to rub at the sharp pain in his back, he applies his fingers to the dust again, sniffling and begging the dirt to offer up another pair of hot-blooded fingers.

 

“Please, oh please please please! Kenny, if you’re dead down there I’m going to kill yo...”

 

The Doctor shuts his mouth.

 

His silt prying hands have found...

 

Gold.

 

Soft, five-fingered gold.

 

He wraps his hand around the man’s dust-coated wrist and pulls.

 

A singularity of pain mines his innards like a spade through old roots, carving his senses into jumbled little pieces.

 

But he pulls.

 

And he heaves.

 

Straining, he manages to haul Kenny out from the chunks of rubble, thrusting the man beyond himself and into the main dock room, away from the stairs.

 

He sinks back, then forward, curving into a ball against the next contractive event- his womb’s version of an awkward office Christmas party.

 

As he flails ineffectually against the slushing of his nerves, the Doctor stares at Kenny, lying where he tossed him.

Kenny’s long hair is gone, replaced by a silvery, hawkish man-pixie styled page boy cut, dusted, of course, by a great many particles of ancient collapsed dock. He stays where the Doctor flung him, against the cracked column.

 

The column topples backward, away from them both, with the force of Kenny’s weight. A perfect toss.

 

Definitely a ten. Possibly an eleven.

 

“Anime will rot your brain, Kenny; it’s obviously where you got that pretty hair- I should really stop watching it.” People might think I’m cool or something- OW!”

 

The unconscious Time Lord’s lungs are working, at least- his chest is moving in the normal fashion, his fingers aren’t twitching... and the coup de grace- every so often, thank something, that reassuring twist of gold splashes from between his lips and skirts off to someplace other than... this.

 

“I should find the altar now, Kenny,” the Doctor murmurs, numbly maneuvering his somewhat unfelt hand into a tight pocket.

 

Dust specks play their silent operatic harmonies in the moonlight like fairy globes, reflecting off each other as they fall.

 

The Doctor looks about with almost an eagerness, wondering at the mounds of dust positioned higher in the moon’s rays then the rest of the fallen structure.

 

“The feed troughs for the catsharks...” he gasps, rubbing the sight back into his gluey eyes.

 

The light seems dimmer...

 

Closing them for the moment, he reaches out with his fist, knocking his balled fingers in crude panto against every structure he knows is within the dust pile radius lit by the light of the only moon of Gallifrey visible from this location.

 

“You know, Kenny...” the Doctor rasps, as loudly as he can with dust in his lungs and such a persistent gnawing in his back, “It’s probably why they chose this site for the altar of Hennalneia- those old dock builders. Like they knew. But what do I know? I’m a Time Lord, not an archaeologist... my wife would have a field day.”

 

No answer, of course. Gutarriezknindracastorblyledgespillioth’s pleasingly dark-skinned body is deeply unconscious, lost in the shiny, sleepful battleground of his own stabilising regeneration cycle against that broken column yonder.

 

With a sigh of content, the Doctor blows, forcing the air from his lungs to travel more than five footsteps away and free the middle trough of dust. With that done, he draws a last breath and opens his bruised hand, dropping the circle-shaped gleam of carved gold inside it into the trough.

 

The Rose Ring.

 

He knows it has caught the light and completed the circuit, because the ground is dancing suddenly beneath the ancient sea upon which the tiny dock is situated. The layers of dust claim the wind scratching up against the horizon, but his eyes are unfocused, shallow; another contraction will take him out completely, for the present. He shudders with the involuntary nature of the subject at hand, and, more than half-blinded by circumstances, clutches up the Ring again, fumbling it into his pocket. A bit of something comes off it... bits of something, crumbling. It must have been scorched; not a surprise, considering the horse’s arse his year has been.

 

“Best not to look a gift mount in the mouth then. I’ve got you both and will monitor through the night, sleep now. We’ll go directly to Boeshane in the morning; but only once you’re able to travel.” calls a deep and familiar voice that curries no argument.

 

A lovely blue hum fills his ears; he almost follows it down into the black, immediately. But...

 

Rassilon.

 

That man... his timbre, that tone, it... hails through the pain-fog like a lighthouse beacon, and the Doctor smiles as he watches Kenny being taken by hover-litter through two beautiful blue doors by himself in a slightly taut grey suit, and him with Rassilon’s strength bearing his own shivering body up in the most delicate, the most incomprehensible of embraces.

 

“H-hey, hot lips!” he gasps, breathless as another contraction builds behind his spine, spilling him into temporary alertness again, long enough to snidely position his tongue and lips just so, “... isn’t this our second honeymoon?”

 

Rassilon chuckles softly, smiling as he steps in through the TARDIS doors. “Well, my most favoured chess partner...it seems things have turned out well to plan. I do hope you’ll share with me the honour of a game later. Old soldiers need their pastimes, after all.”

 

Proud and amused... perhaps even somewhat relieved, the very first Lord President of the Time Lords looks down at his charge, a vaguely hopeful expression gracing the barely quirking edges of his mouth. Of course, the Doctor is already slumbering, his dirty rabbit head lolling there against Rassilon’s chest as he carries him inside.


	22. Thirty White Horses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She might should see a Doctor for that Gum Dis-Ease.

The two flashes of dark light, the Doctor realises as he wakes, are not burning coals; no- nothing so innocuous as that.

 

They are two eyes.

 

Smiling eyes.

 

Two calm, red-ringed blue eyes filled with the promise of death.

 

Thank the stars... those youthful eyelids are closed. He still has...

 

“Borusa said something about my Cossie being one of your experiments, before I tried to kill you back then. In the Old Days. When were you going to share?” Rassilon whispers, bending and dampening the Doctor’s forehead with a wetted white flannel.

 

“There is a time for your anger...” the Doctor says softly, through the rasping file of a throat wrapped by the other man’s omnipresent hands, “...but it is not now. We have a task to complete. Then you may blame me in whatever fashion you choose. Focus on the Present, Rassilon. Focus on the N... GAACK!”

 

The big, strong hands become a big, strong vice- the vicious clench of husbandly animosity vivacious on Rassilon’s face whilst he applies himself to the Doctor’s throat as one would a ripe orange to a table juicer.

 

“You and your ever so thoughtful gifts. I ought to beware them by now.” Rassilon quirks brightly, releasing his fingers as if murmuring a poem to a milkfaced girl.

 

The Doctor collapses to the floor like a rag toy, his head striking in ricochet across the tiling, skipping his skull like a flat stone across a lake. Despite the healthy streak of blood booming from the shallow scalp split, he is not knocked unconscious; instead he moves to sit, rubbing his neck with all his available hand while the other hand pushes up from the floor.

 

He gets up, takes a breath. Blinks slightly. Stares out.

 

His feet twitch suddenly, dancing to the same flamenco as the tic in his cheek.

 

“Of course you should,” he murmurs, cocking his head a little as he rises to stand, pushing off from his knees with a light groan and a smile full of teeth. “Of course you should. I just gave birth to twins you know- have a little care!”

 

A trickle of red-orange runs down his face, invading as it winks his left eye like a river of sweat.

 

“Do I have something in my eye?” he breathes, brushing off his damp purple coat, now stained black from shoulder to pocket in an odd patchwork diagonal reminiscent of Hellequin and Saint Francis.

 

By this time, however, the Mirrors, now a troupe of Italian comedy players composed of dense silver and lights, have emerged from inside the Jade Pagoda along with Borusa, in whose small hand a smaller six year old Flamina’s is held fast.

 

“Oh lord, I’m having an aneurism, I just know it! All this needless emoting!” grumps the Flesh Valeyard  from a doorway. He then sways dramatically away toward a west-leading hallway which, for once, clearly displays the word ‘Bedrooms’ above the entry. His bum however, displays a blue post-it note upon which is written the eponymous phrase,

 

‘BITE ME.’

 

“Are we ready, then?” the Doctor asks, looking up and gazing into empty space as he licks his lips, “...there’s only one more party member, and then we’re off to face the Final Boss!” He jumps up and down, flapping his fingers like a fangirl.

 

A white statue of Fortuna whispers into view, from which a golden voice echoes flatly, “...looking for this?”

 

Her hand bears up a wiggling Master, still in Flesh form, his hoodie now more a pink rabbit suit.

 

She drops him to the floor- his Flesh body spills then flattens, bouncing back into shape like a rubber chew toy.

 

His dark eyes meet the Doctor’s, and they smile in unison.

 

“Look Kos, you’re a pervert! Your girlfriend’s only six years old now. Isn’t that lovely?” the Doctor squeals, smacking his clapping hands together like a candy-crazed child.

 

“I can always make another one.” the Flesh Master murmurs, ignoring Borusa’s blue stare. “Needless to say, your impressions of me are improving.”

 

“Aren’t they though?” the Doctor quirks, reaching for Rosette’s... for Rose’s hand. “Thank you for bringing him, my love,” he says, elbowing her in the ribs as he buries himself in her hair. “Mirrors!”

 

Well, I’ll be seein ya at our usual place,” she murmurs, taking the White Pyramid out from the middle of her abdomen and turning it over; a gush of water spills out, chilling the air around her feet and bringing frost up on the priceless Klimt rug on the Library floor. “...you know! That silly old hill. Whenever you’re...”

 

With drooping shoulders she shakes out the Pyramid, replacing it into the receptacle of her trunk, then disappears in a gasp of brittle wind, smelling of dried roses.

 

Ignoring the wet stain darkening the contrasting stark golds and half-nudes of the old Klimt, the Doctor turns to the Mirrors; they slide out of human form, slipping, melting like the glossy ghosts of ice cream sticks until they’re mere silvery slabs standing behind each of the three men still in the Library room.

 

The Doctor starts to take his place in the middle between the Master on the right and Rassilon on the left, but then sucks in a breath, holding up a finger after dampening it with his tongue.

 

“I almost forgot! To the wardrobe, Batman!” he cries as he scampers away, exiting through a hidden side door pressed into the paneling near a shelf of old knitting manuals. “It’s an occasion, and I need something to wear!”

 

Rassilon pales as he stares after the receding panel... and as Borusa watches for the half-second it takes the color to drain from the man’s features and return again, she bites back a frown.


	23. Night Mare's End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And Then Along Comes Mary.

The Pythia sits idle in her hall.

 

 The Panopticon.

 

The Heart of their false kingdom.

 

The Dome of the Roc above which she hung and waited.

 

Until they.

 

Until They.

 

Released her. Idiots.

 

Three. Stupid. Innocent. Little. Boys.

 

Three opportunities for a pleasing dessert, once they pop up again.

 

A golden cup graces her black oil fingers; she sips from it, applying her lips a third time against the tedium of crawling servants.

 

The favour-currying rats.

 

She plucks a black berry from an old ivory dish; the dish is perched on a stand shaped like a malformed, upward-twisting hand, a mere head or two from her new throne. 

 

It is a carved blue bowl, today; her pillows adorn the rim of it, piling. Tomorrow, she thinks, perhaps she will command it to become an eyeball, or perhaps, the roof of an exotic palace? The carved paw of a giant tafelshrew? No. The skull of a biped. Such a changeable, interesting toy, this throne of hers. So amusingly utile.

 

The Pythia reaches for another stand; there, suspended in dark fluid, rests the living, severed head of a former guard.

 

Another stand, a council member. An older gentleman, with short grey hair that straggles limply in the back and along the sides of the forehead. The iron nameplate spells out RASKELIN.  Some enterprising crafter must have tacked it on. She will find them and eat them, later. There will be no snakes in her basket of eggs.

 

“Thoughtful.” she brags, as she reaches into the cup of Raskelin’s exposed skull and digs, making slop slop noises with her fingers.

 

“INSUFFERABLE WITCH-WHORE!” Raskelin quails without voice, his throat and tongue having long since departed down her ravenous gullet as a snack after yesterday’s breakfast.  “THE THREE WILL RISE! REMEMBER THE SEPULCHASM! REMEMBER THE...!”

 

She squeezes the reddish grey lump, mere leavings of his brain stuck to the bottom of the skull cup, in her curled long blue nails, delicately pressing here and there, crushing. Her eyes glow radiant red, beaming down at him; soon, he is soup, before he can wail and disrupt her luncheon any further. She then grasps the cup, lifts it to her lips, and...

 

A buzz erupts behind her ear.

 

A little fly.

 

But flies are her creatures.

 

She glances around, looking for her tiny pets.

 

At her belt and ankles, the skulls dangle merrily, knocking each other.

 

Plinkle plinkle.

 

Klak.

 

Plinkle plinkle.

 

Klak klak.

 

The Pythia’s head lolls from side to side.

 

 She opens her mouth, her fangs gleaming bloody and thick with stringy bits of Raskelin as she cries, “MY FLIES? WHERE ARE MY FLIES?”

 

A silver gleam shudders into life behind her; a gasp locks the throng to the walls, undulating like a wave from the apex of the spectacle- the place just behind her pillowed throne.

 

None of her little pets seem to be about today; they usually irritate her slaves, crawling up their noses and...

 

The plodding of small feet rapes her ears.

 

Tod, tod tod.

 

Tod tod tod tod.

 

Tod tod, tod tod tod.

 

Tod tod.

 

A swoosh of breeze at her feet, perhaps?

 

No flies.

 

The slaves are staring, all former council members and students with their eyes wide and black on whatever is behind her, their shaved heads dripping the plink plink plink of anticipating sweat.

 

 

“They are down here, Mehgudi,” murmurs a young voice, spear-sharp and alarming.  “With Me.”

 

The Pythia looks down, and sees...

 

Two naked feet, sweet, succulent toes. A violet-eyed child of six. Long hair the color of fresh cut creamy onions. A violent-eyed child of six. Long hands for her age, clean knees.

 

A strange delight expounds upon itself within the tortured confines of the Pythia’s face, recalling wrinkles and brown skin and yellow silks pleasing to the touch of the needy young.

 

Two little feet, and no flies.

 

“Are you one of the day workers?” she mumbles half to herself, taking in the heart-face of this young slip of girl. “I... I was served by such a girl once... you remind me of her. You may... you may stay here, in my palace with me, eat my food. Here.” She waves her arm over Raskelin’s open mouthed head then swipes her arm across her teeth, almost distractedly.

 

“I want you to meet my advisors, Mehgudi.” The little girl breathes, swaying her own arms out in a sweep toward the silvery things standing behind the blue bowl throne. “The Master, the Soldier, and the Threefold Man.”

 

Men come then, tromping softly behind the girl child.

 

 From the right, a blonde man in a hooded coat; stubble pricks his chin. He bends to embrace the child, his hands enfolding her protectively. He scowls at the Pythia, then shivs the air with his finger, in the direction of the throne.

 

“The bitch stole my chair. Go and get her my darling.”

 

From the left, a man with black hair, a smooth carved face; icy eyes that tingle the blood.

 

They step forward a fraction, passing between her twin posts decorated with wet heads.

 

She cannot see from whence the third is coming, and that bothers her.

 

Sinking now into the pool of her pillows, she does not seem to recall how she came to sit down again.

 

Further and further down into the blue.

 

And she can see him.

 

She remembers.

 

She remembers what he did to her.

 

The very words.

 

“Into the Void with you, Mehgudi!”

 

With mussed rabbit hair, he appears like lightning, a half-naked demon wrapped from the waist in a sheet, around his shoulders, a shimmering deep red robe marked with the points of a thousand stars, his fingers grasping a rainbow-colored rose. As he surges forward between the other men, he thrusts the rose at her feet and her throne melts from under her, shifting down and out as if growing legs and crawling away.

 

 Rabbit hair cries out, his fevered green eyes imploring the throne, of all things. “Right Hand of Omega, you must remember me, and I bid you now... transform the Eye into the Egg and let us be done with her!”

 

The black-haired man thrusts up his hand and the throne swirls around his fingers into the shape of a heavy gauntlet, just as the strange red-violet jewel begins shining; soon it burns with a bright snowy light- such is the strength of that light that it turns the moisture in the air around him to fog; he averts his eyes.

 

“That bauble will not stop me, Rassilon! You three will DIE, and your little PET with you!”

 

The Pythia plants her feet. She smiles, opening her eyes widely so as to take in the method of the upstart’s defeat. Then she throws a black bolt of the Dark toward the girl, lashing herself wildly to the hope that it will strike; but her eyes do not lengthen their gaze and afford her their passage. Instead, the girl catches the black dart of light in her hands, like a butterfly and, with a smile, stuffs it down her throat.

 

“I am Flamina, who was Tzipporah, who was Lilea, Mehgudi,” the girl tells her as she begins to grow taller beneath the Master’s fingers, her toes lengthening, leg bones rising, torso stretching until her long arms and subtle breasts are safely beneath his grasp. He straightens, then backs away as her back muscles split into two white fluffy wings the length and breadth of three men. “... I am the Pythia.”

 

 Even as his hand massages her tender new skin, he screams it.

 

“MINE.”

 

Mehgudi stumbles back into the void of her absent throne, unable to find footing on the slick stone of the Panopticon floor.

 

The metalic gleam plays closer on the walls; she can feel the cold of that glint stretching to eternity behind her. Her fingers clench out for one last bolt, her grasping hand straining for Flamina and her lover.

 

But then someone’s pale, dark-veined hand wearing charred gold ring tosses a silver-tipped cane out from the left like a thrown dagger. The spinning stick strikes with violent force across the backs of Mehgudi’s skull-ringed ankles, shocking those delicate tendons and sending her tumbling over herself, open mouthed and backward into the silvery slabs of the standing Mirrors.


	24. Jennifer's Body

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's Not There.

Flashback.

 

The Flesh Valeyard ducks his head out of the Library room, aiming himself for the safety of the stairwell that leads to the new swimming pool, one hand clutching his belly as though he expects something to spill out. Again. How many times has he lost his breakfast now?

 

“I have to get there, get the Ring!” he murmurs, banging his fist on the wall.

 

The floor... is swinging from side to side in his vision; he wasn’t lying about the headache.

 

Well, he thought he was. But obviously not.

 

“Old Girl,” he breathes, falling against the pale sand colored wall, “Stop tossing about! I didn’t intend to spend forever traipsing one picosecond at a time down this damn hallway. Did you move the engine room again? You had better not! I’ll fry your secondary navigational leads and leave you in Jersey for a month!”

 

The hallway totters sharply to the right; a door to a room is on the opposite wall, and he is certain the ship intends to toss him into...

 

His feet fly out from under him, jumping his nerves into several greasy buckets hanging from a ceiling fan, somewhere.

 

The hallway cuts a hard far right this time, and he sails through the open door as it slides open to digest him into the room- he curl himself into a ball, awkwardly hugging his knees around his small but annoying belly against the inevitable impact.

 

As he free falls, something blue and sticky peels off his trousers and situates itself mockingly in front of him.

 

“Bite Me... charming...” he murmurs to himself, patting his stomach as his eyes fly further to the floor.

 

Then the ship rights itself in a quick reverse rotation, leaving him sailing now toward the door he just fell into.

 

“PLEASE! It’s me and I’m pregnant, remember? I tried to help you!” he cries.

                                 

His mouth is like a bloated jelly roll filled with numbing agent, suddenly... he can’t imagine why he said that.

                                                             

She’s his TARDIS! Why would she... why would he need to...

 

 Say...

 

Such a...

 

He plummets as the gravity feeds hum suddenly back to life, spewing nice, refreshing weight back into everything relevant in the room.

 

His back hits something long, hard... jointed. Bones... feels like- an elbow.

 

His head strikes a small roundish object, concussing him.

 

When he wakes up again, the floor is an even line again, albeit colored with bits of jagged glass, towering over half the space in broken shards sticking up from...

 

 He looks down over the precipice, then down at the thing he landed on.

 

His favourite red fiberglass fishing pole! He thought Susan had lost it, back when they...

 

But as his eyes travel its length, he sees it. The rod is broken in two places; the reel he cracked with his skull, breaking the handle entirely. The rod is useless.

 

And...

 

The Master’s still down there.

 

“Koschei!” he yells, and instantly stretches out his hands to telekinese the man up.

 

He strains, and lifts, tugging with every corner of his very distracted mind. He grabs two nearby shards, to lean...

 

“Sharp! OW! Stings!” he hisses, whistling his pain through his teeth. But he holds to them both, feeling the ache begin in his hands, trembling up the nerves of his fingers.

 

He’s not going to let go.

 

 He’s not.

 

Red-orange slicks down the shards, slicking his fingers.

 

The long digits, they’re turning white; the fingertips are greying, bleaching like old wood left on a beach.

 

“Koschei, hold on!” he calls, reaching out with his last bit of air and sense. He’s kneeling in his own blood, sliding forward and backward and sideways, all at once.

 

“KOSCHEI!” his cry falls silent, however, as his knees finally give out and he falls backward, his feet slipping to the sides, jostling his leverage.

 

 Koschei of Oakdown slips off the big shard like that last bit of ice cream, teetering at the top, his body a tiny shell of peanut stuck to the edge of the paper bag.

 

 Any gust of wind could...

 

Any wind! The Time Winds! The residues should be leaking out of the Rose Ring by now! If he can hold to the tiny touch of those trapped in the Ring’s metal, the loops of time energy wrapping around the Master instead of the Master himself, maybe... the ring should still have enough juice for that. Yes.

 

He reaches out again, looking down over the blood-smeared glass floor, getting a feel for the location of the Ring in relation to the engine and the length of Koschei’s arm.

 

Then he closes his eyes, and lifts, keeping tightly to both his blood-wet anchoring shards, both of them cutting into the sinew and arteries above his elbow as he uses his hands to manipulate the energy of the Time Winds.

 

 He pulls, baring his teeth against the friction of the shard against the Master’s flesh.

 

Finally, Koschei’s body heaves itself onto the safer parts of the floor, on the side near the opposite door, which is strangely open. Koschei rolls outside the room, leaving a trail of blood, and the door slips shut again.

                                            

“See, Kos? I told you I’d... save... you. I told... you I would.”

 

The Flesh Valeyard telekinetically unclenches his fist, having severed both his brachial arteries holding onto the shards that way; on the upside, his palm reveals a charred and bloodied golden treasure.

 

Again, he uses telekinesis to twist the Ring into his finger, succumbing to the blood loss just as the Ring quick-jumps him into the Panopticon... his arms spasm and throw themselves about from the lack of blood; a superior vascular reflex inherent in any Time Lord. But that reflex knocks his nearly unconscious body straight into the Pythia’s path. Her path through the Mirror is the last thing he sees before his dimming eyes fail him.

 

He is close to passing out; the brachials will be slow to drain him dry, but drain him they will. He’s going to die.

 

 Blinking, he lies back, curling slightly, both arms wrapped underneath him in an awkward sort of stand, as though he were a glass orb in a carnival gypsy’s stall.

 

He blinks again, staring at the wall for something to do whilst exsanguinating.

 

What? The engine room walls aren’t white! And the door was there before...

 

“What’s going on? If this is the TARDIS, that shouldn’t... I didn’t ask you to... do that! Open that ...door back up... right... now...”

 

“It isn’t though, is it? I’m so glad! Nobody ever notices me...” a giggle bubbles from nowhere, in a vaguely feminine tone.

 

The voice is slightly nasal, scratchy, a bit young. Taking a long, deep breath, the Flesh Valeyard forces eyes he didn’t know had closed back open again. To look.

 

To observe.

 

But his head lolls to the side, too much, the effort. Too much.

 

The floor looks... so very very white now. Like a river of milk. Is that a hand attached to it, crawling along his leg like a Lilliputian? How bizarre.

 

“You said, he could survive if he wanted to,” the voice adds, coming closer now. It’s almost as though it’s beneath him, sounding like a ripple of water as it does.

 

But he mustn’t sleep. He can’t sleep. Not with her in here. It’s not safe... not safe for the...

 

“I’ll take good care of you, and your baby, Doctor...” The voice smooth, so very close now; it must be in his ear. Is it a fly? Well, it isn’t very nice, but perhaps it will... you know...

 

His eyelids are fluttering now, dumpily.

 

“You’re so very pale, Doctor,” the voice soothes. He feels... lifted, as though his weight is being born by something strong. By Her. Hadn’t she said she was? Strong?

 

“That’s right, Doctor... it’s me, Jennifer. The Flesh, from the factory.” The voice is softer now, more gentle, like a pillow over the head. “I’ll take care of you. Then, when you’re better, when you’ve had your baby, you can take me to Rory. The Valeyard promised me! He came and got me, after you murdered us. Rest now.”

 

His eyes snap open, but it’s too late.

 

Thousands of white hands fill every wall.

 

 They descend from the ceiling, reaching, grabbing for him. Soon, they’ll be here. Soon.

 

Soon.

 

The white fills his nose.

 

He cannot scream with his lips... –or- his mind; the Flesh is merging with him.

 

But I’m not the...

 

Susan. Susan. Susan. Susan. Susan.

 

It is the last word that enters his mind before...


	25. Ovum Regem

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cuckoo's Egg.

“Was he good to you, while you were growing inside him?” Rassilon asks softly as he watches his daughter sit by the window, her fingers curled on the sea green comb she’s pushing through her hair.

 

Flamina turns from the window, a sight in her stark white robe and sash, and sighs. Then her face lights up, her narrow smile stretching up to touch her dimples.  It doesn’t fade and she begins to speak.

 

“... for a thousand years, that man kept me safe. I played in a garden, where the trees were so...” her voice quavers, the dying trumpet of a tiny, exhausted elephant. “I was inside his mind for a long time. The catch pools in that garden were filled with silver water, and the hedges were like mazes topped with fog! They went on for years...” She reaches to touch Rassilon’s cheek, grabbing his skin. Exploring it with careful birdish fingers. “I knew... all I had to do was cry or trip, or cut myself in a little thorn. He would be there. Waiting. He taught me how to ride a bicycle- that’s a vehicle from Earth. We sang songs. We painted portraits and landscapes by the sea. He put sand in my hair, and we watched the sun go down together, with my head in his lap. I would... he... sometimes he would... he often kept...”

 

She pauses, biting the inside of her lip and staring up into Rassilon’s patient blue gaze, studying his face for the end of her sentence.

 

“He would... what? Regale you with war stories? Bore you to tears? Perhaps... cook you breakfast and then forget and burn it?” Rassilon offered with an odd, stiff little bounce of his shoulders, not wanting her to notice the seething anger he felt at the man’s sheer neglect of his feelings with regards to his wife.

                                                                 

“Oh papa, are you trying to be cheerful? It doesn’t suit you very well at all!” Flamina laughs and pats his cheek again. She rises from her chair, and goes to the window of her Citadel apartment once more, releasing a deep breath as she leans and presses her thin nose against the cold glass.

 

“Winter on Gallifrey... I’ve never seen it. I imagine you have. What is it like? Is it like this? The Doctor always showed me fantastic things, and he was always cooking me something or babbling on about a book he wanted me to read. He got them mixed up, sometimes. There was this one about a unicorn... but he got it confused with the one about the two bears and the ladder made of stars... but you, papa...” she murmurs, heaving another great breath, so heavily that her small bosom rises two hands off the windowsill. “You would never tell me the truth, like he did. He is a kind man. I... oh!”

 

Rassilon’s hands slip around her neck, dangling a cold metal object down her white lace bodice. His fingers fasten a clasp, rest on her back for a moment, and then remove themselves, almost like letting go.

 

“My daughter, you should look in the mirror...” the man murmurs, looking down, then up again, hoping to meet his daughter’s eyes.

 

She floats away from the window, toward the seven silver Mirrors in her room.

 

“It seems,” Rassilon says flatly, “... that the Mirrors have taken a shine to you, daughter.”

 

“They keep me honest.” she says, gently grasping the ornate curls of silver along the top of the middle mirror. She looks at him, eyeing him via the crisp reflective surface. “...won’t you forgive him? He had to do it; it was the only way to save things. I was there, papa. I know.”

 

Rassilon harumphs, grasping his chin as he considers things. “We’ll see. He has done many dangerous things, and endangered you. Endangered everything. Endangered your relationship with the Master.”

 

Flamina rounds on her father, bracing herself with the window, her back to the glass- a stance betraying the validium will beneath that delicate lace, lavender eyes boring into him with all the force of a raging solar storm- a tactic she learned from the Doctor, no doubt.

 

“’My Lover,” she counters flatly, “... has a name- it’s Koschei. And I know about the Doctor, Papa. I know, I know. I know. But he was kind to me. He taught me things you never could. He saved mother. Saved Gallifrey. Helped my silly bookworm save the universe. They do that rather a lot. Ought to do it together, really... Koschei says he’s coming to the ceremony tomorrow, whether the Doctor tells him it’s all right or not. Please forgive the Doctor, Papa? Please? He’s trying so hard to be a good man, despite everything that’s happened. You don’t know what he’s lost.”

 

“All right, all right. I will eventually. For you. Borusa needs us in the Panopticon in one hour, all right?” Rassilon quips, pointedly brushing her good-hearted glare off his shoulder as he walks out of the room and down the hallway to the Doctor’s study...

 

And as he passes the Doctor’s door, where the man is lying practically in state, sleeping off the last few hours, he smiles, thinking to himself, not today, Doctor... not today.

 


	26. Freedom to Live

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not the Milk Man.

His hands shut the blue doors behind him with a satisfying clack.

 

“Like the slip of a shoji door, if you do it properly,” he murmurs to no one in particular. “... how very frightening. Never quite realized how much. Good. That ought to be useful, later.”

 

 The ground is greyish, he notices as he picks his way among the many boxes and lines and wires and old cracked displays.

 

His eyes find the empty place, finally, after a boatload of unnecessary walking.

 

Concentrating, he can make out the vague shape, the outline of the box.

 

Playing his hands along the edges, he finds the catch, unhooks it, then makes a quick look-turn around before peering inside.

 

“Don’t want to give any tenants ideas, eh?” he murmurs, chuckling to himself. “After all, it’s Chocolate Sunday! Nobody visits this Museum on Chocolate Sunday? Especially since the sudden ice age...”

 

He blinks, eyeing the figure in the box.

 

 Stone.

 

Drape of a toga.

 

Short hair.

 

Raised hands.

 

A warm, almost sunny smile.

 

And a crudely-made sign that would put any well-seasoned turista to shame.

 

“And what’s your problem? Cat got your tongue? Ahaha!” he squirms out a finger from his whitely clenching fist and jabs it at the sign-wearer in the box.

 

“And what’s this then?” he adds, peeking in closer, one eye on the box’s lone occupant, one eye on the wriggling thing in those hammily outstretched arms. He looks in the strange silver Mirrors covering the inside of the box, and learns the answer in an instant.

 

Of course, he already knows. Kind of.

 

 Maybe.

 

“Hello, Mehgudi!” he purrs, reaching in and retrieving the small package of bundled cloth, from which a tiny hand emerges, coupled with a smallish, fair-olive face framed in soft, dark baby fuzz. “Or Susan, I should say. Hullo, Susan! I’m your grandfather! See?”


	27. Epilogue: Oestre Egg

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bunny Stew.

Two hours later, in the Library...

 

He’s tried everything.

 

That old fiddle is lying in the corner. He’s tried that. And broke the bow too; it’s lying over there, in three pieces against the door’s foot panel.

 

Milk isn’t doing it, there are fifteen different bottles on the floor, at least. He sticks his finger at each of them to show her, counting as he adjusts her for the seventeenth time, switching to the other elbow.

 

“Maybe the machine is off...” he reasons aloud, wandering into the hallway and snapping his fingers. The room with the drinks machine slips silently into place behind the door. He goes in.

 

He looks down at Susan. “Oh, goodness,” he breathes, hopping gently with excitement as his foot connects. “Milk, water, milk, water. Boring!”

 

Susan’s lip begins to shiver, and a deeply doleful cry bubbles from her little throat.

 

“Oh ho ho, that’s all right my precious child, it’s just a nasty old machine! Not the one we need, anyhow. How’s about...” he spins around, distracting her for the moment with the sudden, dizzying movement while he grabs a random doorknob, “... we try this one? It’s bound to have something good inside!”

 

The sleek silver door opens on a small, circular room.

 

All white.

 

There is a strange tree of cables in the center, from which nothing seems to be hanging, yet.

 

The Doctor puts his hand against the trunk of the circuit-tree, and holds Susan up so she can see the hollow tube inside its many white trunks.

 

“Look, look, Susan, there’s something in there, isn’t there? Do you like that?” he murmurs, pushing her face a little into the opening in the white viney tubes.

 

There is a body inside the tree, grown out of it, the hands bearing two Gold Rings, slightly charred. The wrists cross over a lower torso caved in almost to the point of emaciation and growing from the knees out of the root-like structures at the base of the circuit-tree.

 

Susan’s eyes rise higher, taking in the long elbows and forearms, the broad shoulders, the wide clavicle.

 

“Taking him in, are we?” the Doctor says, patting her on the head as she cranes. “It’s only natural; after all, he’s me. But I’m not him. Am I, little girl?”

 

Susan moans and twists her head out of his hand, applying her teeth to his accusing pinkie.

 

The impression leaves the Doctor less than impressed.

 

 So unimpressed, in fact, that he...

 

“You little so and so... well well. Still got that spunk, eh? No matter.” He holds her up and points again, this time to a gigantic shadow hanging above them.

 

She hadn’t noticed that before.  She tries to look. He even lifts her up, smiling up at her as she gets her first good glimpse of the monstrous thing hanging casually above them.

                                 

A giant egg... like something that should grow on the tree anyway, but... it’s so...

 

The huge egg is glowing with lines, black lines... so white it is... but those black lines... what is in that egg? Susan can’t understand why it has to be so big.

 

“Big.” She gums, her eyes widening further as he tosses her up and down and up and down over and over again, to make her dizzy.

 

“Well, that’s nice. And quite true, really.” he breathes the words in her ear, enjoying the scent of her fear as it reaches her nostrils. “Because I’m the Valeshard, one glorious piece of a much greater whole, and this is you. You’re going to be eaten by what’s growing in that egg. Oh yes, little girl, Zagreus is going to come out, and he’s going to eat your bones and wear your skin like an Armani suit! Enjoy, you little snot.”

 

He backtracks out the door, tipping an imaginary hat as he whips out the sonic and buzzes the lock through the window, so she can watch him seal her in.

 

Her eyes become wet quickly. She beats her little fists on the grates beneath the strange white tree, bringing up purple blotches on the sides of her hands.

 

Her mouth falls open, and she bawls.

 

The egg reminds her of the teleport pod, so she bawls some more.

 

The door is locked; the Valeshard locked it in front of her.

 

She waits for a long time, at least five bouts of bawling, before a strange sensation pricks on the back of her neck, like something is...

 

A light flashes in front of her, a scar-shaped light, twisting and curling with blues and whites and silvers, like thorns. How does she know what thorns are?

 

She smiles.

 

A wrinkled old hand, attached to a wrinkled old man in a wrinkled leather jacket and a rumpled waistcoat, comes out of the light. A girl is in his arms.

 

He looks at Susan.  Susan looks at him back.

 

Then Susan looks at the girl, and opens her mouth.

 

The wrinkled old man pulls on his little bit of beard, and then his pocket watch. Then he sets the girl in his arms down, and comes to pick up Susan. Before he reaches her, she swipes a look at the sleeping girl. She has brown hair! It’s long... nice and silky... and her lips are dark.

 

“This is Clara, Susan,” the old man says as he scoops Susan up and holds her head against his chest, nuzzling his beard in her head fuzz. “Kind of like Mamlaurea, isn’t she?”

 

                                                                                                                                                           

 

End of The Return Heptalogy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be continued in DARKLIGHT.


End file.
